The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology 9781474460552

Table of contents :
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Modernist Technology Studies
Part I Machines
1 Electricity: Technologies and Aesthetics
2 Clocks: Modernist Heterochrony and the Contemporary Big Clock
3 Print: Anaïs Nin’s Embodied Encounters with Print Technology
4 Subways: Underground Networks Through Modernist Poetry and Prose
5 Automobiles: The Modernist Gaze and Speed’s Visual Limit-field
6 Aeroplanes: Rethinking Aeriality in a Long 1930s
7 Robots: Gendered Machines and Anxious Technophilia
Part II Media
8 Materials: Glass, Iron and Ghostly Fabric
9 Advertising: Magazine Ads and the Creation of Femininity in Early Twentieth-century America
10 Photography: Gertrude Käsebier and the Maternal Line of Sight
11 X-rays: Technological Revelation and its Cultural Receptions
12 Cinema: Notes on Germaine Dulac’s ‘Integral Cinema’, Form and Spirit
13 Radio: Blindness, Disability and Technology
14 Music: Modernist Remediation and Technologies of Listening
15 Performance: Machine Dances and the Avant-garde’s Technological Imaginary
16 Amplification: At Home with Marlene Dietrich Overseas
Part III Bodies
17 Sex: Hypnosis, Hormones, Birth Control and the Modernist Body
18 Race: Fordism, Factories and the Mechanical Reproduction of Racial Identity
19 Technics: Education and Pharmakon in Lawrence, Simondon and Stiegler
20 Germs: The Shocks, Politics and Aesthetics of Microbial Modernism
21 Noise: Labour, Industry and Embodiment in Interwar Factory Fiction
Part IV Systems
22 Nation: GPO Documentaries and Infrastructures of the Nation-state
23 Infrastructure: Women Writers Confront Large Technological Systems
24 Paperwork: Atomic Age Bureaucracy in C. P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers
25 Information: Literature and Knowledge in the Age of Bradshaw and Baedeker
26 Computation: The Work of Calculation Between Human and Mechanism
27 Networks: Modernism in Circulation, 1920–2020
28 War: Modernism in Camouflage, Strategic Fantasy and the Technological Sublime
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology

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Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities Recent volumes in the series The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies Edited by Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories Edited by Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol The Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts Edited by Roxana Preda

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The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology Alex Goody and Ian Whittington

Forthcoming The Edinburgh Companion to Charles Dickens and the Arts Edited by Juliet John and Claire Wood The Edinburgh Companion to the Brontës and the Arts Amber Regis and Deborah Wynne The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities Gavin Miller, Anna McFarlane and Donna McCormack The Edinburgh Companion to W. B. Yeats and the Arts Tom Walker, Adrian Paterson and Charles Armstrong

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The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology

Edited by Alex Goody and Ian Whittington

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cuttingedge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation, Alex Goody and Ian Whittington 2022 © the chapters their several authors 2022 Cover image: Paul Kelpe, Machinery (Abstract #2), 1933-1934, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the U.S. Department of Labor, 1964.1.27 Cover design: Jordan Shaw Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10 / 12 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 6054 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 6055 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 6056 9 (epub) The right of Alex Goody and Ian Whittington to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of Figures viii Acknowledgementsxi Introduction: Modernist Technology Studies Alex Goody and Ian Whittington

1

Part I. Machines   1. Electricity: Technologies and Aesthetics Laura Ludtke

23

  2. Clocks: Modernist Heterochrony and the Contemporary Big Clock Charles Tung

36

  3. Print: Anaïs Nin’s Embodied Encounters with Print Technology  Jennifer Sorensen

51

  4. Subways: Underground Networks Through Modernist Poetry and Prose Sunny Stalter-Pace

63

  5. Automobiles: The Modernist Gaze and Speed’s Visual Limit-field Enda Duffy

78

  6. Aeroplanes: Rethinking Aeriality in a Long 1930s Leo Mellor

91

  7. Robots: Gendered Machines and Anxious Technophilia Katherine Shingler

105

Part II. Media   8. Materials: Glass, Iron and Ghostly Fabric David Trotter

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vi contents   9. Advertising: Magazine Ads and the Creation of Femininity in Early Twentieth-century America Einav Rabinovitch-Fox

138

10. Photography: Gertrude Käsebier and the Maternal Line of Sight Alix Beeston

155

11. X-rays: Technological Revelation and its Cultural Receptions  Tom Slevin

175

12. Cinema: Notes on Germaine Dulac’s ‘Integral Cinema’, Form and Spirit Felicity Gee

192

13. Radio: Blindness, Disability and Technology Emily Bloom

212

14. Music: Modernist Remediation and Technologies of Listening Josh Epstein

226

15. Performance: Machine Dances and the Avant-garde’s Technological Imaginary Emilie Morin

243

16. Amplification: At Home with Marlene Dietrich Overseas257 Damien Keane Part III. Bodies 17. Sex: Hypnosis, Hormones, Birth Control and the Modernist Body Jana Funke 18. Race: Fordism, Factories and the Mechanical Reproduction of Racial Identity Joshua Lam

273

286

19. Technics: Education and Pharmakon in Lawrence, Simondon and Stiegler Jeff Wallace

300

20. Germs: The Shocks, Politics and Aesthetics of Microbial Modernism Maebh Long

314

21. Noise: Labour, Industry and Embodiment in Interwar Factory Fiction Anna Snaith

328

Part IV. Systems 22. Nation: GPO Documentaries and Infrastructures of the Nation-state Janice Ho

345

23. Infrastructure: Women Writers Confront Large Technological Systems Jennifer L. Lieberman

362

24. Paperwork: Atomic Age Bureaucracy in C. P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers376 Caroline Z. Krzakowski

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contents

25. Information: Literature and Knowledge in the Age of Bradshaw and Baedeker James Purdon

vii

390

26. Computation: The Work of Calculation Between Human and Mechanism Andrew Pilsch

404

27. Networks: Modernism in Circulation, 1920–2020 Shawna Ross

417

28. War: Modernism in Camouflage, Strategic Fantasy and the Technological Sublime Patrick Deer

432

Notes on Contributors

447

Index451

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Figures

Figure 2.1 The Time Traveller’s mantel clocks in George Pal’s The Time Machine, 1960, and Doc Brown’s dresser clocks in Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future, 1985.43 Figure 2.2 The Doomsday Clock on the cover of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 1947, and the staircase inside the Clock of the Long Now, 2011. 44 Figure 2.3 Edward Curtis’s ‘In a Piegan Lodge’, 1910, and the architectural design for a US Post Office building with clock tower in the Annual Report of the Supervising Architect of the Treasury Department, 1888, reprinted in Lois Craig’s The Federal Presence, 1984. 46 Figure 7.1 Marcel Duchamp, Mariée (Bride), 1912. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950. © Photo SCALA, Florence. © Succession Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021. / © Jacques Villon / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London. 110 Figure 7.2 Marcel Duchamp, La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (The Large Glass), 1915–23. Philadelphia Museum of Art, bequest of Katherine S. Dreier, 1952. © Photo SCALA, Florence. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021. 112 Figure 7.3 Francis Picabia, Jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité, 291, 5–6 (July–August 1915), p. 4. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021. 113 Figure 7.4 Francis Picabia, Fille née sans mère, 291, 4 (June 1915), p. 2. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021. 114 Figure 7.5 Francis Picabia, Voilà ELLE, 291, 9 (November 1915), p. 3. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021. 115 Figure 7.6 Marius de Zayas, ‘Elle’, 291, 9 (November 1915), p. 2. 116 Figure 9.1 Cannon Towels advertisement, Vogue, 1 October 1931. Image published with permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.  142 Figure 9.2 Ford advertisement, Vogue, 1 April 1924. Image published with permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.  144

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list of illustrations

Figure 9.3 ‘The Suffrage and the Switch’, General Electric advertisement, The Independent, 18 August 1923.   Figure 9.4 ‘This Beauty Every Girl Can Have’, Palmolive advertisement, The Ladies’ Home Journal, January 1922. Image published with permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.  Figure 10.1 Gertrude Käsebier, ‘Lollipops’, ca. 1910. Digital positive from the original gelatin silver negative. Library of Congress, Gift of Mina Turner, 2006684252.  Figure 10.2 Gertrude Käsebier, ‘Blessed Art Thou among Women’, 1899. Photogravure. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mr and Mrs Miguel LaSalle and Peter Sinclair, 83.263.  Figure 10.3 Gertrude Käsebier, ‘The Manger (Ideal Motherhood)’, 1899. Platinum print. J. Paul Getty Museum, 84.XM.160.1.  Figure10.4 Gertrude Käsebier, Hermine Turner photographing Mason a nd Mina Turner on the roof of Käsebier’s studio at 315 Fifth Avenue (variant of prize-winning photograph in Kodak advertising contest), ca. 1909. Platinum print. George Eastman Museum, Gift of Hermine Turner. Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum.  Figure 10.5 Kodak catalogue cover, ca. 1900s. Image courtesy of the Martha Cooper Collection.  Figure 10.6 Gertrude Käsebier’s Photographic Workroom, ca. 1915. Special Collections, University of Delaware Libraries, Gift of William I. Homer.  Figure 10.7 Gertrude Käsebier, ‘Real Motherhood’, 1900. Platinum on tissue. Museums Collections, Special Collections and Museums, University of Delaware, Gift of Philip and Laura T. Shevlin, 1994.07.003.  Figure 11.1 Wilhelm Röntgen, X-ray photograph of Anne Berthe Röntgen, 22 December 1895. Figure 11.2 ‘Variations sur les rayons X’, La Nature, May 1896. Figure 11.3 ‘An X-ray shadow picture’, Popular Electricity in Plain English magazine, May 1909.  Figure 11.4 Illustration from Life magazine, February 1896.  Figure 11.5 Umberto Boccioni, Development of a Bottle in Space, 1912. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Lydia Winston Malbin, 1989. Figure 11.6 Umberto Boccioni, Table + Bottle + House, 1912. Pencil on paper. Civico Gabinetto dei Desegni, Castello Sforzesco, Milan. Figure 11.7 Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912. Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021. Figure 12.1 Arabesques, Germaine Dulac, 1929.  Figure 12.2 Arabesques, Germaine Dulac, 1929. Figure 12.3 Intertitle, La Coquille et le clergyman, Germaine Dulac, 1927.

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150 156 158 159

164 165 166

169 176 177 180 180 185 186

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list of illustrations

Figure 12.4 Thèmes et variations, Germaine Dulac, 1928. 205 Figure 12.5 Thèmes et variations, Germaine Dulac, 1928. 206 Figure 13.1 ‘Blind listener, Mr Oransby (right), listening to his Crystal Radio Set with headphones, December 1929’. Reproduced with permission from the BBC Photo Library.  220 Figure 14.1 BBC Engineer, in BBC: The Voice of Britain, dir. Stuart Legg (BFI). 233 Figure 14.2 Sir Adrian Boult conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, in BBC: The Voice of Britain.233 Figure 14.3 Sir Adrian Boult’s baton giving a downbeat, in BBC: The Voice of Britain.233 Figure 14.4 Hand of a BBC engineer during Beethoven performance, in BBC: The Voice of Britain.234 Figure 14.5 Schoolyard round game, in Listen to Britain, dir. Humphrey Jennings and ed. Stewart McAllister (BFI). 236 Figure 14.6 Factory loudspeaker, in Listen to Britain.236 Figure 14.7 Women singing to Music While You Work, in Listen to Britain.236 Figure 14.8 Final frame of Listen to Britain.238 Figure 15.1 Copy print: Members of the Bauhaus Stage Workshop on the Roof of the Studio Building, 1927 (printed ca. 1948), Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Herbert Bayer, © President and Fellows of Harvard College, © T. Lux Feininger, © Estate of T. Lux Feininger, BR48.121. 253 Figure 22.1 Railway tracks, Night Mail. BFI National Archive; COI / Crown ©.349 Figure 22.2 Railway switch levers, Night Mail. BFI National Archive; COI / Crown ©.349 Figure 22.3 Telegraph wires, Night Mail. BFI National Archive; COI / Crown ©.349 Figure 22.4 Pigeonholes, Night Mail. BFI National Archive; COI / Crown ©.350 Figure 22.5 The ocular power of the expert, The Coming of the Dial. BFI National Archive; COI / Crown ©.352 Figure 22.6 Post office staff working together, 6:30 Collection. BFI National Archive; COI / Crown ©.353 Figure 22.7 ‘Gutted GPO Dublin’. The Postal Museum ©.356 Figure 22.8 Dudley Buxton, ‘Automatic Suffragette Exterminating Pillar-Box (Patent NOT Applied For) Postcard’. The Postal Museum ©. 358 Figure 27.1 Network graph of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. © Samuel Alexander. Reproduced with permission.  418 Figure 27.2 Network graph of John Dos Passos’s USA. © Samuel Alexander. Reproduced with permission. 419

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Acknowledgements

T

he editors would like to thank Edinburgh University Press, and particularly Jackie Jones, for the opportunity to edit this volume. We would also like to thank Susannah Butler, whose patience and editorial good judgement were both much appreciated, and all of our authors, who have managed to produce such brilliance in the midst of a global pandemic. We thank them for their goodwill, their fortitude and their intellectual generosity. Special thanks go to Felicity Gee for stepping in at the eleventh hour to provide an excellent chapter on ‘Cinema’ for this volume. Our gratitude also goes to our anonymous readers for their kind and useful feedback on our proposal, and to all our colleagues who gave advice and support as we worked on this volume. Alex’s personal thanks go to the School of English and Modern Languages at Oxford Brookes University, who supported her work on the volume; in particular she would like to thank Antonia Mackay and Andrea Macrae for their sheer brilliance. She is also grateful to the wider modernist studies community in the UK, who have made it a sustaining environment in which to do academic research. Finally, she would like to thank all the Willoughby-Goodys (and Cooks and Ashworths) for their love and care, with special thanks to Jasmine. Ian’s personal thanks go to his colleagues at the University of Mississippi, whose flexibility and compassion allowed him the time to focus on shepherding this volume through a pandemic and new parenthood. In particular, he is grateful to Ivo Kamps, Caroline Wigginton, Dan Stout, Matt Bondurant and Ally Nick. Most importantly, he would like to thank Claire Byrne, for making it all worth it, and young Torin Byrne, for making it all new.

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Introduction: Modernist Technology Studies Alex Goody and Ian Whittington

I

n the spring of 2020, almost a century after his final novel was published, E. M. Forster was suddenly current. On social media, on the BBC website and in web publications like The Nautilus, commentators hemmed in by the global Covid-19 pandemic found in Forster an unlikely prophet of their newly isolated and richly mediated existence (Perkowitz 2020; Gompertz 2020). Confined to their homes, wrapped in a machinic embrace, lulled by the hum of electronics and gorging on information whose circulation they were themselves sustaining, readers across the globe might be forgiven for identifying with the protagonists, not of Forster’s Edwardian novels of class and interpersonal relations, but of his 1909 novella ‘The Machine Stops’. One of the earliest descriptions of a total media system as the twentieth century would come to know it, ‘The Machine Stops’ imagines humankind ensconced in honeycomb-like cells underground, with music, books and information available at the touch of a button. Travel, though once common, has become an anxious experience, as residents of an earth altered by unspecified ecological devastation resist the urge to journey by airship merely to see the interior of another human residence. Presiding above it all – until its titular arrest – is the Machine, a substitute God in the form of an all-surrounding technological envelope whose continued smooth functioning has become its own justification. As the character Vashti tells her son, Kuno, ‘You mustn’t say anything against the Machine’ (Forster 1928: 4). Forster, attentive as he was to the nuances of embodied human connection, saw in his own time the first whispers of a technologised future in which humans risked a terrible corporeal attenuation: ‘Men seldom moved their bodies,’ the narrator tells us; ‘all unrest was concentrated in the soul’ (10). Kuno, who emerges as the doomed hero of the tale, struggles against the perceptual effects of the technological cocoon. Kuno’s attempts to convince his mother of the Machine’s dehumanising effects ground Forster’s tale in the language of its fin-de-siècle media ecosystem: ‘We say “space is annihilated,” but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. We have lost a part of ourselves’ (17). Better, in Kuno’s mind, to return to an unmediated, direct bodily experience of the world in which ‘Man is the measure’ (18). Forster’s prediction may have been overly dire, but what stands out – and what binds our historical moment to his, modernist, one – is his ability to envision a global system of linked technologies whose contours and relations we have inherited. ‘The Machine Stops’ imagines a metastasised version of the socially and historically specific media system whose early twentieth-century emergence, as Julian Murphet has

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argued, was crucial to the radical reshaping of the arts that we know today under the name of modernism (Murphet 2009: 10–15). Since the turn of the millennium, modernist scholars have seized on the central significance of technology in newly interdisciplinary readings of the period that have emerged under the auspices of the ‘new modernist studies’ first described by Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz in their 2008 PMLA report on the state of the field. Mao and Walkowitz argue that critical attention to the proliferation of technologies in the modernist era – particularly the role that mass communications play in promoting global and transnational ways of thinking and writing – represents a vibrant new direction in modernist studies (742–5). This Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology fully realises the vibrancy of this new direction and captures how modernist technology studies have developed, and continue to develop, in the twenty-first century. By focusing on the historical relationship between modernist practices and technologies of production, consumption, distribution and representation, the manner in which writers and artists have explored the human impact of new technologies, and the literary and artistic questions raised by new technologies, this volume presents modernism, modernity and technology as mutually defining, conceptually intertwined categories that demand to be considered together. Of course, the turn to technology in modernist studies pre-dates the ‘new’ modernist expansion of the field: the foundational text of American studies, Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden, had placed technology at the centre of American culture back in 1964, reading The Great Gatsby as a modern fable of the archetypal ‘protean conflict figured by the machine’s increasing dominance of the visible world’ (364). In the same period, erstwhile literary scholar Marshall McLuhan was using William Shakespeare, Ezra Pound and James Joyce to spark his theories about the constitutive function of mediation in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964). In The Mechanic Muse (1987), Hugh Kenner – a student of McLuhan’s in the 1940s – made significant claims about the impact of the technological environment of the early twentieth century on the aesthetics of modernism in Pound, Joyce, T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett. Cecelia Tichi’s Shifting Gears, from the same year, deployed the ‘gear and girder technology’ of American modernity as a direct analogy for Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and William Carlos Williams’s ‘radically new conception [. . .] of the written word’ (1987: 16). Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (1983) and Martha Banta’s Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen and Ford (1993) are significant volumes in the development of modernist technology studies, exploring how radical shifts in the human conception and experience of the world derive from changes in technology and culture, but are not restricted to a single technological innovation or sphere of life. As these foundational works make plain, and the chapters of this volume corroborate, modernists themselves were keenly aware of the machines and media that helped to configure their lives and work. Recent years have seen a surge of historically inflected and theoretically aware scholarly engagement with the diverse machinery of modernity; it is such newly vital currents in modernist studies that inform the chapters in this volume. Modernist technology studies does not limit itself to the isolated consideration of a particular author’s response to technology (Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Pound), nor to the way a particular movement (Futurism or Bauhaus, for example) engages with the second industrial

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introduction

3

revolution. Rather, it seeks to understand the early twentieth century as what David Trotter has called the ‘first media age’ (Trotter 2013). In this broader view, the technological is comprehended as a mode of realising, utilising and being in the world, as well as the tools, perspectives, innovations and topographies generated by technological and scientific processes. For most of our contributors, this composite understanding of ‘the technological’ is mediated in and through language, a position which implicitly aligns with the more overt stance taken by modernist scholars working within the emerging field of technography. Exemplified by the Open Humanities Press series Technographies, this approach seeks to bridge the gulf between literary analyses that privilege a humanist, anthropocentric textuality and those that focus on media and technologies through a materialist, posthuman lens. It does so by focusing on writing as ‘the form of mediation through which human reality and technical reality are most readily understood to be mutually articulative’ (Purdon 2017: 6). As James Purdon frames it, contemporary work in modernism and other fields of the cultural humanities needs to appreciate not only how ‘writing is technological, through and through’, but also how the technical is itself discursive and so ‘the converse is also true: technology is written, through and through’ (Purdon 2017: 8). Sean Pryor and David Trotter point out in their introduction to the first volume in the Technographies series that there are historical and etymological reasons for doing so: the Greek τεχνολογία (technología) originally described not a material device, object or system, but rather a specialist discourse (Pryor and Trotter 2016: 15–16; see also Purdon 2017: 5–6). The technological, then, was first a craft – a technē – of the written word. And yet, while literary studies has accustomed itself to thinking of writing as a technologised practice (whether of stylus, pen, type or electrons), scholars have tended to gloss over the ways that technologies both are articulated through discursive practices, and articulate themselves through patterns and forms that can be called rhetorical insofar as they are expressive, even persuasive, in ways legible to their users (Pryor and Trotter 2016: 15–16). Attending properly to the ways that ‘writing mediates technology’, Pryor and Trotter argue, might help us to ‘recuperate some of the strangeness [. . .] of the idea of “technology”’ (2016: 10, 15). For modernists themselves the technologies of the early twentieth century were indeed often strange, even if much of the strangeness lay in the speed with which the extraordinary became assimilated into the fabric of ordinary life, something Steven Connor has noted of the technologies of vocal disembodiment that flourished around the turn of the twentieth century (2000: 410). Nor did modernists hold themselves aloof from these assimilations: the period can be characterised, as it is by Mark Morrisson, as a period of ‘rampant boundary crossing’ in which science, technology and literature are mutually informing paradigms in an era of innovation and change (Morrisson 2016: 44). Contemporary studies of modernism and technology serve to rework, if not entirely debunk, the pervasive mid-twentieth-century assumption of a fundamental opposition between modernism (understood in its canonical formulations as an elite artistic practice) and technologies of mass communication, transportation and consumption.1 Instead, these studies illustrate how modernism, as an expression of modernity, is inescapably technological, even when particular facets of technology provide the focus for modernists’ aesthetic, political or social critique. One key aim of modernist technology studies is thus to parse modernist aesthetics in order to perceive, in Mark Goble’s words, ‘all the ways in which they gratify and indulge their mediums

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and materialities of communication’, and to grasp ‘the way that modernist expression wants to wire bodies into circuits with all manner of machines’ (Goble 2010: 8, 12). As outdated critical divisions between media and between ‘brows’ (high, low and middle) have waned, work on modernism and media has flourished. The field of modernist studies is now rich with work on modernism and cinema, which has opened up the discourses around visual media, and work on modernism’s engagement with radio, sound technologies and communication technologies.2 That the reach of the technological extends beyond these familiar media is demonstrated in recent modernist studies criticism; Victoria Rosner’s Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life (2020), for example, unearths a ‘modernization of domesticity’ (25) that moved far beyond the concrete introduction of domestic and media technologies into the home, while Adrienne Brown’s The Black Skyscraper (2017) apprehends the modernist cityscape as not only a technologically enabled environment serviced by ultramodern lifts and built of steel and concrete and glass, but one with profound repercussions for the cultural formation of race in the USA. Modernist technology studies now intertwines with other fields such as critical disability studies, critical race studies and animal studies, resulting in intersectional work, some of which is showcased in this volume, that exceeds the normative canons and assumptions of previous generations. In other modes, scholars are exploring modernist art, literature and culture through the frames of twenty-first-century technology, using theoretical concepts and contemporary formal innovations to rethink modernist aesthetics, and the tools of digital humanities to generate new topographies of modernism, modernist texts and modernist objects.3 The diversity of approaches and topics in modernist technology studies reflects our own distance from, and connection to, the modernist era. We live in a society pervaded by technology that has its origins in the early twentieth century, but are also able to deploy digital technologies and the methodological tools that derive from them, distinguishing us from the writers and artists of modernism. We are also acutely aware of the role that we, as humans, have played in creating the technological systems of the Anthropocene and, thus, of the apocalyptic repercussions of the technosphere that was emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century. This is perhaps the most salient conclusion of Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’ today: that the apparent spatial annihilation and userly disembodiment associated with modernist technologies are false flags by which those technologies mask their pronounced material effects on the world shared by human and non-human actors. At our own moment of drastically elevated stakes, the chapters in this volume look back on the effects, causes and theories of technology that preoccupied the writers and artists of the early twentieth century, and explore how our current conceptualisations of technology refract new understandings of modernist practice.

Technology in Theory The early decades of the twentieth century saw the rise of new forms of technologically attuned cultural criticism articulated to the machine aesthetic and machine fears of modernism. This writing inaugurated an understanding of technology as central to the modernist era in ways unprecedented in previous generations, and it was often closely imbricated with the tumultuous political upheavals of the times. The chapters

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in this Companion draw on this long and complex history of theoretical engagements with technology. In surveying the major developments in twentieth-century theories of technology as it relates to cultural production, this Introduction seeks to provide readers, especially those new to the field, with a common understanding of the intellectual foundations on which the chapters in this volume are built. It is perhaps their understanding of the tight interweaving of politics with technologies of representation and transmission that has granted the thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School the most influential and enduring positions in the study of culture and technology. Walter Benjamin, whose ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’ became a foundational text for critical and cultural theory, took his own life fleeing the Nazis in 1940. Benjamin’s work, as evidenced by the contributions to this volume, resonates through modernist technology studies, foregrounding a central tension in the cultures of modern technology: Benjamin identifies, on the one hand, a link between a certain kind of technological mass culture and fascism, and on the other the liberating potential in technology’s decentring of bourgeois-humanist notions of art, subjectivity and the individual. For Benjamin, ‘technical reproducibility’ transforms art, destroying elitism and generating ‘new productive forces’ and new modes of perception (Benjamin 2008: 27). In Benjamin’s vision, technology offers revolutionary and creative possibilities for an alternate collective existence, rather than the inevitable production of a commodified experience and a domination of the natural world. ‘The mastery of nature, so the imperialists teach, is the purpose of all technology,’ he notes; however, ‘technology is not the mastery of nature but of the relation between man and nature [. . .] In technology a physis is being organized through which mankind’s contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form’ (Benjamin 1979: 104). Other theorists associated with the Frankfurt School – including Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno – were also victims of fascism, leaving Germany for the USA after Hitler’s rise to power. Their critiques bear the mark of that history, and are fundamentally a response to the totalitarianism that inevitably results from the ‘technological rationality’ that arose during the early twentieth century (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002: 121). Herbert Marcuse had been Martin Heidegger’s assistant in Freiberg in the early 1930s but he too left Nazi Germany and eventually settled in the USA. In his One-Dimensional Man Marcuse describes a ‘technological process of mechanization and standardization’ (1964: 3) that, despite an original intention to produce freedom from want and to liberate the individual, actually demands conformity and the erosion of independence of thought and autonomy. Rather than celebrating the liberation from bourgeois traditions of privilege and authority as Benjamin did, Adorno and Horkheimer, and Marcuse after them, feared that the levelling effected by technical reproduction erased the freedom and integrity of the human individual. In Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer argue that modern culture is an exhaustive technological mediation, wherein everything appears ontologically similar: technological rationality effects an equalizing quantification, bringing everything in line with itself, rubbing out the non-identical and so paving the way for its own superfluousness . . . Thinking reifies itself into a self-running, automatic process striving to be like the machine which it itself produces so that ultimately the machine can replace it. (25)

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For Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘standardization and serial production’ lie at the core of the Culture Industry – their term for the mass culture produced by and in the service of modern technological capitalist consumerism – which ‘has sacrificed that which made the logic of the work different from that of the social system’ (121). Further, they argue that mass leisure itself always functions under the conditions of industrial production because ‘[a]musement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work’ and ‘the fabrication of amusement commodities . . . is determined so fundamentally [by the technologies of fabrication] that people during their time off can experience nothing other than the afterimage of the work process itself’ (137). This sense that the Taylorite factory, with its seamless integration of human bodies with mechanical capitalist production, is the shape of all culture is echoed by other German critics of the time. Benjamin saw ‘the Fun Fair with its Dodgem cars and other similar amusements [as] nothing but a taste of the drill to which the unskilled labourer is subjected in the factory’ (2007 [1939]: 176) and Siegfried Kracauer, in ‘The Mass Ornament’, understood the synchronised dancing of the Tiller Girls as an industrial assembly line process in which ‘the hands in the factory correspond to the legs of the Tiller Girls’ (1995 [1927]: 79). Though such anthropocentric approaches dominated, the relationship between humankind, technology and non-human nature concerned many early and midtwentieth-century thinkers in ways that presage contemporary analyses. In Heidegger’s ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1954), for example, the ontological view of modern technology that takes the world as a ‘standing reserve’ (Bestand) to be utilised is inevitably one which annihilates human freedom as it destroys nature. Indeed, a productive coupling of critical technology studies and environmental awareness emerged from the modernist era, illustrated by the work of Lewis Mumford. Fundamentally concerned with the relationship between technology, agency and power, Mumford’s social histories of technology emphasise the place of technology within a wider concept of technics that exceeds functional or utilitarian applications. In his later works this concern is focused on the contemporary emergence of powerful technological systems or ‘megatechnics’. In Technics and Human Development, the first of two volumes that make up The Myth of the Machine, Mumford describes ‘megatechnics’ as ‘a uniform, allenveloping, super-planetary structure, designed for automatic operation’, within which ‘man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions [. . .] will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of de-personalized, collective organizations’ (1967: 3). In contrast to megatechnics Mumford proposed the concept of ‘biotechnics’, a form of post-industrial system that limits its negative effects on the ecology and the organism (1970: 395); this concept was a significant influence on subsequent American environmental thinking and its key theorists, such as Murray Bookchin.4 That the ‘question’ of technology also extended beyond the material process of resourcing, inventing and producing and into the information and publicity systems of modern capitalism is evident in the work of Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann. For Bernays the technological modern world and its mass media raised particular queries about, and opportunities for, the manufacture of public approval. The titles of his books track a subtle change in the framing of that manufacture: what he once comfortably termed Propaganda (1928) became, in 1945, the new field of Public Relations (both fields concerned, in the words of Bernays’s oft-quoted dictum, with ‘the

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engineering of consent’; 1947: 113). Walter Lippmann, whose background was likewise in propaganda, was more concerned with exposing the flaws in the information system than deploying the power of the mass media technosphere. In Public Opinion (1922), which Mark Wollaeger describes as ‘one of the founding books of modern media studies’ (2006: 25), Lippmann’s focus is on the mediated nature of modern existence, in which the informational environment produced by technology is ‘too big, too complex’ and therefore impossible for the individual to comprehend. Instead, the modern individual inhabits a subjective image of the world, a ‘pseudo-environment’ in which the ‘connection between reality and human response [is] [. . .] indirect and inferred’ (Lippmann 1991 [1922]: 15–16, 27). This prescient conception of a technologically mediated world, which sounds very much like the simulacra of postmodernism, appeared in the ‘high modernist’ year of 1922. The political implications of the mass media Culture Industry, the dangers and possibilities of powerful technological systems and the subservience of the human to technology all concerned mid-century critics. As the century drew on, critics assessed the continued imbrication of technology with cultural production, integrating new media – satellite communications, computers and television among them – into their understanding of modernity and using those technologies to redefine the borders and texture of modernism as an aesthetic practice. Marshall McLuhan was the iconic theorist of the new media of the Sixties generation, identifying a shift from a mechanical age to an electric age, an era of speed and simultaneity in which technology effects a physical evolution of the human being. Jessica Pressman positions McLuhan, who began his career as a professor of English, as the ‘midpoint between modernism and digital modernism’ (Pressman 2014: 47–52, 54). McLuhan’s invocation of Pound (with whom he corresponded) and Joyce to underpin his media theory signalled his investment in the theoretical dimension of all creative arts: ‘It’s always been the artist who perceives the alterations in man caused by a new medium, who recognizes that the future is the present, and uses his work to prepare the ground for it,’ he told one interviewer (McLuhan and Norden 1969: 56). It is possible to see, in the multimodal, collage form of some of his work – The Medium is the Massage was accompanied by a Columbia Records album, for example – a blending of modernist experimentation with radical media theory: All media are extensions of some human faculty— psychic or physical. (McLuhan and Fiore 1967: 26) McLuhan’s conception of media as an ‘extension’ of the self, an ‘outering’ and altering of ‘sense ratios or patterns of perception’, responds to the technological developments

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of his era; he was writing at the dawn of the computer age, of the ‘television generation’ and of ‘information war[s] [. . .] fought by subtle electric informational media’ (1967: 127, 138). His famous adage, ‘the medium is the message’, is not concerned with the content of technological innovations and mass media; rather, it identifies how meaning inheres in the changes ‘of scale or pace or pattern’ of communication and interpersonal connection that a new medium generates (2001 [1964]: 8). Further, McLuhan’s contention that the ‘content of any medium is always another medium’ (2001 [1964]: 8) prefigured the conception of ‘remediation’ that was taken up at the century’s end by Jay Bolter and David Grusin (2000), enabling new accounts of modernist cultural forms and their relationship to contemporary and digital media. McLuhan’s celebratory vision of a world transformed into a ‘global village’ in which ‘“space” has vanished’, a ‘simultaneous happening’ where ‘[i]nformation pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously’ (McLuhan and Fiore 1967: 63), is at odds with Mumford’s warnings about the destructive effects of systems of ‘megatechnics’ in The Pentagon of Power (1970). But the major rival to Mumford’s thinking at the mid-century was not so much McLuhan as Jacques Ellul. Ellul postulates that the ‘technical milieu absorbs the natural’ and replaces nature (1964: 79), and that technology has become a self-augmenting force, imposing unprecedented adaptations on the human. He criticises Mumford for what he sees as his narrow focus on modern technology (1964: 98); Ellul’s The Technological Society offers a conception of ‘technique’ that is much wider than Mumford’s technics, arguing that technique ‘integrates the machine into society’, facilitating a takeover under the guise of human technological adeptness (5). The impact on the human is fundamental, penetrating ‘the deepest recesses of the human being’ (325), so that as ‘technique enters every area of life, including the human, it ceases to be external to man and becomes his very substance’ (6). Ellul identifies ‘standardization’, ‘rationalization’ and ‘impersonality’ (11–12) as the key elements of the contemporary technological society and posits that ‘nothing at all escapes technique today’ (22). Technology for Ellul is purposeless, unpredictable, morally indifferent, non-ideological, and has become autonomous and universal. The Technological Society ultimately offers a bleak vision of a ‘monolithic technical world’ that cannot ‘be checked or guided’ (428). Raymond Williams, possibly the central figure in the emergence of cultural and media studies in the UK academy, was unpersuaded by Ellul’s chilling vision of society, politics, economics and the human absorbed into the self-augmenting process of the technical, a vision Williams described as a ‘fatalistic’ and ‘extreme formulation’ hampered by ‘distortions’ (1972: 57, 59). Williams’s own, much more sanguine, writing on communication technologies testifies to his affirmative interest in the practices and cultures of everyday life. Williams rejects technological determinism, technophilia and indeed technophobia, foregrounding the politics and social contexts of technological development, which he reads as a contingent rather than determined process. This put Williams in direct conflict with McLuhan’s ideas: for McLuhan, Williams claimed, ‘all media operations are in fact desocialised; they are simply physical events in an abstracted sensorium’ (1974: 127). In contrast, Williams argues that ‘technology is always, in a full sense, social’ and is ‘necessarily in a complex and variable connection with other social relations and institutions’ (1981: 227). Williams points to the development of broadcasting, for example, as an extensive period of technological development and experimentation that was crucially linked to complex social milieus

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and changing definitions of public and private. He also saw a correlation between technological innovation and modernism, noting that ‘[p]hotography, cinema, radio, television, reproduction and recording all make their decisive advances during the period identified as Modernist’ (Williams 1989: 50). Williams’s influence is hard to overstate: his is one of the early but enduring voices to fuse literary analysis, Marxist theory and the study of technology. While McLuhan and Williams might be held up as exemplars of technological determinism and of the social construction of technology, respectively, recent decades have seen the emergence of what might be called a ‘soft determinist’ school of thinking about media. Cultural historian Lisa Gitelman represents an influential voice within that school, and her description of media captures a view that animates many of the contributions to this volume: media are, she argues in Always Already New, ‘socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols, and where communication is a cultural practice’ (Gitelman 2006: 7). This flexible approach acknowledges the constitutive function that technological systems can exert on the human communities of which they are a part, without ignoring the range of behaviours that shape the evolving form and function of those systems. Machines barely determine themselves, let alone us: phonographs were once business machines; radio broadcasts were, in their earliest days, sometimes transmitted via telephone lines; microwave ovens were developed from the magnetron tubes used to generate short-wave military radar. An accurate genealogy of modernist technologies recognises the role played in their development by contingency, institutional pressures and socially embedded practices of uptake, modification and repurposing. Beginning in the last decades of the twentieth century, a flurry of new approaches to the study of technology began to emerge, which can be loosely assembled under the question of what comes after or alongside the human. Many such posthumanisms scramble the question of determinism by radically reshaping the category of agency itself: for example, the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) developed by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, John Law and others imagines technological devices as agents in an essentially non-hierarchical network of relations with other agents (whether human or non-human, organic or inorganic, simple or complex). Crucial to ANT analyses of these networks is the distinction between ‘intermediaries’ – those components of the network that transmit the force or effect of some other agent essentially unchanged – and ‘mediators’, which exert their own effects on the forces that move through them (Latour 2005: 105). In Latour’s statement of the ‘principle of irreduction’ that serves as an essential starting point for ANT methodology, the implications for media studies are clear even if Latour’s aims are broader: ‘a concatenation of mediators does not trace the same connections and does not require the same type of explanations as a retinue of intermediaries transporting a cause’ (2005: 107). Technological media translate the forces that pass through them; only a close and careful analysis of the relations between technologies, human users and other agents – one that does not presuppose a greater agentic power reserved for humans – can accurately describe the play of forces in a network. Even before Actor Network Theory, Donna Haraway’s germinal ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985; revised 1991) was troubling the human/machine boundary. The essay offers a revolutionary account of the ‘theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine

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and organism’ that constitute the cyborg figuration, ‘fusions’ formed from the ‘leaky distinction’ between humans and their technologies, and in the process raises pointed questions about agency, autonomy and ethics (1991: 150, 175, 152). Since Haraway, other forms of posthuman thinking that dethrone the humanist subject have flourished. Rosi Braidotti argues for ‘the need to rethink subjectivity as a collective assemblage that encompasses human and nonhuman actors, technological mediation, animals, plants, and the planet as a whole’ (Braidotti 2017: 9). Jane Bennett, in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010), offers a similarly anti-hierarchical and pointedly ethical argument about the ‘public value’ in reassessing ‘nonhuman, thingly power, the material agency of natural bodies and technological artifacts’ (2010: xiii). Such a reassessment is urgently needed, given the ecological and political crises of the twenty-first century. As Bennett argues, If human culture is inextricably enmeshed with vibrant, nonhuman agencies, and if human intentionality can be agentic only if accompanied by a vast entourage of nonhumans, then it seems that the appropriate unit of analysis for democratic theory is neither the individual human nor an exclusively human collective but the (ontologically heterogeneous) ‘public’ coalescing around a problem, a public that includes non-human (and technological) actants (2010: 108). N. Katherine Hayles, meanwhile, highlights the ‘entanglements and interpenetrations of human and technical cognitive systems’ (2017: 40) which have decentred the thinking human subject and which demonstrate that the ‘search for meaning [. . .] [is] a pervasive activity among humans, animals, and technical devices, with many different kinds of agents contributing to a rich ecology of collaborating, reinforcing, contesting, and conflicting interpretations’ (2017: 212). The posthumanist recognition of human–technical assemblages and the ‘vibrant matter’ (both technological and organic) of the non-human world is of particular relevance to modernism. Joyce himself uses the term ‘posthuman’ to describe his characterisation of Molly Bloom in Ulysses (Joyce 1957: 180), and explorations of posthuman modernisms have found in Joyce’s work a ready resource for rethinking the humanist subject and its relation to the mechanics of language in a technical world (Borg 2007), or for considering non-human ethics (Ebury 2017). For Jeff Wallace it is the work of D. H. Lawrence, and his engagement with scientific writing and discourse, that offer a principal site for exploring the animal–human–machine nexus in modernism (Wallace 2005), whilst Virginia Woolf remains a touchstone for Braidotti’s critical theory (see Braidotti 2008 and 2014; Braidotti and Regan 2017). Posthuman theory is also mobilised in recent work that moves on from a singleauthor focus. Erin Edwards ranges over different modernists and modernist sites to examine the corpse as ‘posthumanist, representing a significant reconfiguration of the humanist discourses that define the human’s hierarchical relation to natural and technological worlds’ (Edwards 2018: 5). In her exploration of the modernist corpse Edwards examines its technological mediation and presentation, and in doing so, reads literary modernism as ‘actively engaged in material assemblages with other technical media forms, such as photography, film, and sound recording’ (Edwards 2018: 15). Ruben Borg takes ‘posthuman theory to be a product of modernism, a mythology or a conceptual grammar by which modernism thinks through some of

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the contradictions inherent in its historical moment’, and goes on to look through the ‘cybernetic eye’ of Woolf, Conrad, Hitchcock, Pirandello, Beckett and others (Borg 2019: 6, 13). This new work in modernist studies illustrates that the convergence of posthuman and postanthropocentric discourses in contemporary critical thought have reoriented critical attention to how modernist artist and writers explored different understandings of materiality, engaged with virtual and cyborg bodies or non-human subjectivities, and deconstructed the border between bodies and things. The relationship between bodies and things, or more accurately between humans and technical objects, has been the concern of media archaeology, much of which attends to the media ecology of the early twentieth century and has roots in early film history. Though all varieties of media archaeology are fundamentally concerned with the material culture of media technology there are, nevertheless, stark differences between how the relation between the human and the technical is conceived. Where Gitelman (as discussed above) is interested in the interplay of social and technological forces in forming ‘media’ as we know them, Friedrich Kittler, who has been enormously influential in the field, is most usually read as a techno-determinist, as evidenced by his oft-quoted dictum that ‘media determine our situation’ (Kittler 1999: xxxix).5 In his work from the 1980s and 1990s Kittler firmly distances himself from a subject-centred approach, occluding the human in his exploration of the discourse networks of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (in which he links physical, technological, discursive and social systems), and in his account of the advent of the inscription machines (gramophones, film and typewriters) that reduced linguistic signs and the symbolic to bare ‘materiality and technicity’ (1999: 15). Thus, for Kittler, the advent of mechanical storage ‘designates the turning point at which communications technologies can no longer be related back to humans. Instead the former have formed the latter’ (211). Kittler identifies the cusp of the twentieth century as a point of rupture and, as Stephen Sale and Laura Salisbury point out, he became a ‘key reference point’ for modernist scholars exploring ‘the materiality of media in transition in the [. . .] period described in the second half of Discourse Networks when literature’s monopoly came to an end with media differentiation’ (2015: xxix). Other theorists of media and technology who have been taken up in modernist studies in recent years include Vilém Flusser and Gilbert Simondon,6 both of whom propose a more complex understanding of the interrelationship between the human and the technical. Flusser rejects technological determinism, and proposes a paradigm of the ‘apparatus–operator complex’ – which he sees as ‘the motivating force behind all contemporary social and technological change’ (Ströhl 2002: xii) – to get inside the ‘black box’ of technology (Flusser 2000: 16). Flusser is concerned to demystify the ‘magical’ power of this black box and undo the ontological alienation and programmed behaviour it generates. In Towards a Philosophy of Photography Flusser articulates his ideas of the ‘apparatus’, which is his term for non-human (technical) agency; he describes ‘the photographic universe as the product of cameras and distribution apparatuses [. . .] industrial apparatuses, advertising apparatuses, political, economic management apparatuses’ and thus ‘the whole complex of apparatuses is therefore a super-black-box made up of black boxes’ (Flusser 2000: 71). The ‘complex’ Flusser proposes of ‘apparatus–operator’ signals the interdependent functioning of human and machine, each of which exists only through its relationship with the other. Flusser is crucially interested in the humanistic, in the possibility of ‘playing

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against’ the apparatus and programmed behaviour (Flusser 2000: 80), and speculates about the possibility of a future ‘telematic society’ where, ‘although mass media are being used almost exclusively for discourse, they could be changed in a way that would allow for dialogue as well’ (Flusser 2002: 170, 19). Simondon also takes on the black box of technology and rejects the assumption that ‘technical objects do not contain a human reality within them’ (2017 [1958]: 15). Rather than reducing technical objects to their utilitarian function, Simondon offers a dynamic theory of technology in which a ‘technical ensemble’, infused with social as well as machinic potential, enacts its effects amid a ‘milieu’ and in ‘relation’ to other objects and forces. The technical ensemble, that is, involves more than particular tools or machines; it also involves the relations amongst technical objects (tools and machines), the relations between them and the humans who use them, and the relations between them and their environments. The human is with(in) this ensemble and not alienated from or threatened by it: ‘man [sic] functions as permanent inventor and coordinator of the machines around him. He [sic] is among the machines that work with him [sic]’ (2017 [1958]: 18). Both Flusser and Simondon are interested in the assemblage of agential subject and technicity, pointing to the human reality that pertains in any technological ensemble. By diffusing agency throughout a system of organic and inorganic actants capable of producing effects, these posthumanist theories at once free humans from the grip of a maniacal technological determinism and puncture any notion of the uniqueness of human effectuality. If we remain, as Simondon says, ‘permanent inventors and coordinators’ of our technological envelope, we also surrender the sense of a unique human autonomy that many modernists struggled to sustain in the face of an accelerating world. A century past modernism’s heyday, faced with a range of existential threats both novel (anthropogenic climate change) and oddly echoic (global pandemic), the challenge has never been so stark: to see ourselves clearly in relation to the technologies that shape us as we shape them; to act as part of immense and complex systems we only partially understand; to delight in technological possibility even as we learn to curb the excesses that threaten to stop the machine entirely.

Chapter Overview This volume is organised into four parts which reflect but also seek to generate the taxonomies of technology in modernist studies, in which technology can be variously conceived as apparatus, medium, process or system. Our concrete and quotidian experience of technology most often manifests, as it did for those living in the early twentieth century, in the form of machinery and equipment, in the things produced through the application of scientific and technical knowledge. It is in encounters with these things that the entanglement of human life processes and machine processes becomes most apparent; the opening section of the volume, Machines, therefore examines a series of crucial early innovations and inventions that altered the way individuals lived, worked and moved. The chapters explore different vectors of the modernist human–machine assemblage and consider the relations between forms of artistic production and the advances or apparatuses that remade daily life, from the organisation of time under modern cultures of efficiency to the sense of distances suddenly abridged thanks to new modes of transportation. But, as with our current Internet of Things,

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the machines of modernism were embedded in complex networks of association and configuration and so, as the chapters here and in subsequent parts of this volume articulate, these machines can never be experienced as discrete objects without an attendant awareness of the systems within which they operate. In the contribution on ‘Electricity’, Laura Ludtke points to the undecidability of electricity, from its essence to its dubious modernity, and analyses how electric lights were deployed in early modernist poetry. In the next chapter, ‘Clocks’, Charles Tung reads in modernism’s many timepieces not only the assertion of personal, subjective time in resistance to public, ordered temporalities, but also a ‘new heterochronic order’ whose disjunctive temporal scales and rates urge a new, anti-triumphalist perspective across the first century of the Anthropocene and beyond. Following this, Jennifer Sorensen offers an account of modernist ‘Print’ that focuses on modernist writers’ embodied, physical engagement with print cultures, exploring the direct encounters with printing technologies that Anaïs Nin records in her diaries. In subsequent chapters Sunny Stalter-Pace, Enda Duffy and Leo Mellor consider transport technologies that, in contrasting ways, shape human perception and modernist writing. Stalter-Pace argues that the ‘Subways’ of modern cities across the world (London, New York, Paris, Buenos Aires) generated different forms of ‘underground connection’ that meant city space could be ordered in new ways. The subway experience of liminality, segmentation and disruption (of distances, and of the distinction between the local and the global) can, she argues, be read as ‘literal enactments’ of the meanings and strategies of modernist texts. Enda Duffy’s ‘Automobiles’ postulates that the entirely new ‘speed gaze’ demanded of drivers by their cars engendered effects, not only in the cinematic arts whose hectic field of representation mirrors the windscreen, but also in the modernist techniques of stream of consciousness whose unfolding perspective places readers, as it were, in the driver’s seat. In the chapter on ‘Aeroplanes’ Leo Mellor explores ‘aeriality’ in writing of the long 1930s and identifies an, often unsettling, aerial vista that reveals both literal and cultural patterns and is accompanied and interleaved with disconcerting bodily sensations. The paranoia and unease that characterise the individual response to this aerial vista manifest textually, Mellor argues, at the level of both language and structure. Finally, in this part of the book, Katherine Shingler considers humanoid technology in the form of ‘Robots’, tracing versions of the machine-woman across a transnational avant-garde and arguing that the fin-de-siècle ambivalence towards the machine takes a particular turn with the ‘disruptions to sex and gender threatened by the imagined figure of the robot’. If human life became increasingly entangled with new machines over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was also increasingly experienced through new representational means – in other words, new Media. ‘Medium’ is a capacious term whose resonances (as John Guillory (2010) has demonstrated) extend from divine intercession and spiritual channelling to the tools of the beauxarts and the electro-mechanical technologies that joined their ranks, beginning in the nineteenth century. But as David Trotter outlines, in his chapter on ‘Materials’, modernist media included ‘useful matter’ like the iron and glass that shaped much of the built environment, and that became substances of concern for many modernist authors. These materials, Trotter argues, ‘created a context for literary experiment’, and their effect on the literary text cannot be accounted for entirely through cultural materialist approaches.

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The most common contemporary usage of the word ‘medium’ relates to technological mediation, the transmission of information and cultural representations by electronic signals or other means, and the centrality of this usage reflects a modernist ascendancy that has never been challenged or reversed. Central to this ascendancy, as Einav Rabinovitch-Fox demonstrates in ‘Advertising’, was the rapid and widespread circulation of consumer advertising fuelled by improved print technology and increased discretionary spending among the middle classes. Women were particular targets for this newly visual advertising regime, as corporate entities sought to appeal to changing notions of (predominantly white, middle-class) femininity in ways that celebrated and secured new freedoms without appearing too radical. Much as women’s agency has been written out of the narrative of modernist advertising, their vital role in the cultural history of photography has been effaced. In the chapter on ‘Photography’, Alix Beeston argues for renewed attention to the œuvre of Gertrude Käsebier, who was not only influential in the development of modernist photography as a whole but emerges as emblematic of the vernacular and feminised aspects that have been pushed out of narratives of modernism more generally, to the detriment of our understanding of the period. Tom Slevin’s chapter, meanwhile, shows how X-rays, like other visual media, fundamentally transformed the relationship of modern subjects to their bodies, as they began to perceive the human form as newly legible and permeable. Felicity Gee’s exploration of Germaine Dulac’s ‘Integral Cinema’ in the chapter on ‘Cinema’, like Beeston on Käsebier, also thinks through feminised and indeed feminist aspects of this modernist technology. Gee’s analysis moves across Dulac’s avant-garde cinematography and film-philosophy, highlighting how this work reflects on and also generates an affective encounter between the human sensorium and the cinematic apparatus. Rounding out this section are a quartet of chapters that remind us that mediation can be an auditory and immersive experience, and not only a two-dimensional visual one. Emily Bloom unpacks the connections between broadcasting and disability in ‘Radio’, pointing out that the casual metaphors of ‘blindness’ that attached themselves to the medium, though generative, rarely involved any serious engagement with blind listeners. Josh Epstein’s chapter on ‘Music’ positions non-verbal sound in the intermedial context of interwar and Second World War film, as a way of demonstrating that composers saw their music as deeply technological and woven into the larger media matrix of modernity. For Emilie Morin, a kindred intermediality manifests itself throughout the corpus of avant-garde performance by artists affiliated with Dada and Bauhaus, affording new visions of the human body-as-mechanism in their theatrical and dance productions. Damien Keane, in ‘Amplification’, explores the acoustic and informational feedback loops that connect the Second World War propaganda contributions of Marlene Dietrich to the intelligence files the FBI used to document her movements and those of other émigrés; fidelity and intimacy are watchwords that obtain as much in the culture of hi-fi and that of the security state, both of which emerged from the technological matrix of the Second World War. The subsequent part of the book offers specific focus on Bodies and mechanisms. From the late 1990s, following Tim Armstrong’s landmark volume Modernism, Technology and the Body (1998), modernist technology studies have paid close attention to the embodiment of technology and to its various affects and effects on the human form. Armstrong himself considers technologies of prosthesis, consumption

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and rejuvenation in his account of the role modernist technologies of the body had in generating an artistic avant-garde. In The Senses of Modernism (2002), Sara Danius examined how the senses have become technologically mediated in modernity, seeing a progressive internalisation of the technological modes of phonography, telephony, motoring and cinematography in key modernist writers and artists. This topic has remained an insistent area of study for scholars, refracted now through emergent interests in prosthetics, virology, haptics and the modernist posthuman. If technologies are, as McLuhan theorises, extensions of ourselves, they are also extensions on to and into the self of that which is normally understood to be outside the self. Thus, the contributions to the third part of this book on Bodies assert the primacy of the body as a locus of techno-cultural interaction and mediation. Jana Funke begins with a focus on hypnosis, hormones and birth control, illustrating how modernist texts negotiate the production of desires and sexed bodies through these modern technologies of ‘Sex’. Joshua Lam’s examination of ‘Race’ takes as its focal point the Fordist factory as a site in which regimes of industrialised management produced the very categories of racialised bodies that they disciplined. In the account of ‘Technics’ Jeff Wallace reads D. H. Lawrence’s education essays through Simondon and Stiegler, and thus, instead of discovering resonances with the pseudo-science of eugenics, locates a progressive technics in Lawrence, one which celebrates a ‘life-equality with the world of things’ and gestures towards a corporeal technical ensemble that might enable ‘participatory modes of knowledge, education and politics’. In the chapter on ‘Germs’ Maebh Long explores the contagious world of modernity, discovering a fragmented and flattened modernist body and an attendant aesthetic ‘invested in the shock of the microscopic and the threat of the dimly perceived’. In ‘Noise’ Anna Snaith focuses on interwar British writing that depicts industrial racket to explore the role that literature played in ‘the shaping, staging and resisting of definitions of noise’. Snaith argues for the importance of attending to the impact of noise on the body in working-class industrial fiction and examining the ‘complex and competing narratives about the symbolism and semiotics of noise’ this writing offers. The final part of the volume considers Systems: those technological assemblages whose connectivity enables the flow of information, resources and people. In ‘Nation,’ Janice Ho considers the constitutive function of state agencies in forming the nation, taking as her key example the General Post Office (GPO) in the UK, which at various points mediated the country’s mail, telecommunications, documentary film output and many financial services. The centralised infrastructural role of the GPO might be contrasted with the more diffuse and asymmetrical large-scale systems Jennifer Lieberman analyses in ‘Infrastructure’. By focusing on how the meanings of infrastructure emerge in gendered and racialised contexts through the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Pauline Hopkins, Lieberman maps a plurality of responses to the networks emerging in the early twentieth century. Caroline Krzakowski, in ‘Paperwork’, tackles the technology of the nation-state from another perspective: the bureaucratic protocols and documents of the British Civil Service in the atomic age. Through close readings of C. P. Snow’s novels The New Men and Corridors of Power, Krzakowski demonstrates how mid-century realist fiction could structure itself around the very paperwork which undergirds the nuclear state as a technologised system, thereby attesting to the real, if attenuated, power of information workers within the government. ‘Information’, as James Purdon argues in the chapter of the same name, was

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everywhere in the modernist era, even if ‘information technology’ as we know it was still some decades away. Instead, ‘information’ named a set of genres of writing built around discontinuous units of information largely stripped of narrative – a set of genres that became the textual other through which modernism came to know itself. Though the computer age would not begin in earnest until after the Second World War, Andrew Pilsch demonstrates in his chapter on ‘Computation’ that modernists, including Gertrude Stein and André Breton, developed compositional practices that bore an uncanny resemblance to the algorithmic methods under development in interwar mathematics. Moving the discussion into the twenty-first century, Shawna Ross links up the ‘Networks’ of modernism with present-day tools of mapping and analysis, reading in the nascent webs of affiliation between modernist artists a model of collaborative and decentred agency that presages the network imaginary of our own moment. Like the networks that structure our informational lives, the technological roots of ‘War’ as it is experienced today reach back to the modernist moment of crisis, as Patrick Deer argues in the closing chapter of the volume. Deeply ambivalent about the mingled menace and fascination of mechanised combat, modernists often found themselves mobilised in relation to war, whether as official artists and shapers of coherent national narratives or as critics of what Deer calls the ‘technological sublime’ of modern warfare. Between the promise of illumination and the threat of the total annihilation of human time, the chapters in this Companion encompass the heterogeneous and often conflicting ways that technology shaped modernism and vice versa. If the dominant narrative of technology in the twentieth century is that it served as a prosthetic extension of the human body and its abilities, the texts surveyed herein indicate that artists and intellectuals of the era understood a deeper level of imbrication: of modern technologies with modern bodies, of means of representation with the object represented, and of technological and infrastructural systems with the human networks they sustain.

Notes   1. Influential formulations of this position can be found in Greenberg (1939), Huyssen (1986) and Carey (1992).  2. For accounts of the relationship between modernism and visual technologies including photography and cinema, see Marcus (2007), North (2005 and 2009), Trotter (2007) and Beeston (2018), among many others. For the relationship of radio and other sound media to modernism, see Avery (2006), Cohen et al. (2009), Keane (2014), Dinsman (2015), Bloom (2017), Mansell (2017), Napolin (2020), and Lodhi and Wrigley (2020).   3. For overviews of modernist digital humanities scholarship, see Shawna Ross (2016 and 2018), Gabriel Hankins (2018), and Stephen Ross and Jentery Sayers (2014). See also the ‘Manifesto of Modernist Digital Humanities’ by Christie et al. (2014).   4. For a recent collection surveying the intersection of technology and the environment in modern Britain, see Agar and Ward (2018).   5. For other versions of media archaeology see, for example, Parikka (2012), Ernst (2003, 2005) and Elsaesser (2004).   6. For recent work on Flusser and modernism see Aaron Jaffe et al. (2021). For recent work in modernist studies that draws on Simondon see Eric White (2020); see also Jeff Wallace’s chapter on ‘Technics’ in this volume.

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Works Cited Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer (2002 [1947]), Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agar, Jon and Jacob Ward, eds (2018), Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain. London: UCL Press. Armstrong, Tim (1998), Modernism, Technology, and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Avery, Todd (2006), Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Banta, Martha (1993), Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen and Ford. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Beeston, Alix (2018), In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benjamin, Walter (1979 [1928]), ‘One-Way Street’, in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott. London: New Left Books, pp. 45–104. Benjamin, Walter (2007 [1939]), ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Shocken Books, pp. 155–200. Benjamin, Walter (2008 [1935–6]), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (second version), trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 19–55. Bennett, Jane (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bernays, Edward R. (1928), Propaganda. New York: Horace Liveright. Bernays, Edward R. (1945), Public Relations. Boston: Bellman. Bernays, Edward R. (1947), ‘The Engineering of Consent’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 250 (March), pp. 113–20. Bloom, Emily (2017), The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin (2000), Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Borg, Ruben (2007), The Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida. London: Continuum. Borg, Ruben (2019), Fantasies of Self-Mourning: Modernism, the Posthuman and the Finite. Amsterdam: Brill. Braidotti, Rosi (2008), ‘Intensive Genre and the Demise of Gender’, Angelaki, 13: 2, pp. 45–57. Braidotti, Rosi (2014), ‘Writing as a Nomadic Subject’, Comparative Critical Studies, 11: 2–3, pp. 163–84. Braidotti, Rosi (2017), ‘Posthuman Critical Theory’, Journal of Posthuman Studies, 1: 1, pp. 9–25. Braidotti, Rosi and Lisa Regan (2017), ‘Our Times Are Always Out of Joint: Feminist Relational Ethics in and of the World Today: An Interview with Rosi Braidotti’, Women: A Cultural Review, 28: 2, pp. 171–92. Brown, Adrienne (2017), The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Carey, John (1992), The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939. London: Faber & Faber. Christie, Alex, Andrew Pilsch, Shawna Ross and Katie Tanagawa (2014), ‘Manifesto of Modernist Digital Humanities’ (online publication), (last accessed 29 July 2021). Cohen, Debra Rae, Michael Coyle and Jane Lewty, eds (2009), Broadcasting Modernism. Gainesville: University of Florida Press.

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Connor, Steven (2000), Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Danius, Sara (2002), The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dinsman, Melissa (2015), Modernism at the Microphone: Radio, Propaganda, and Literary Aesthetics During World War II. London: Bloomsbury. Ebury, Katherine, ed. (2017), Joyce, Animals and the Nonhuman, Humanities journal, Special Issue, 6: 3 (September). Edwards, Erin (2018), The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the Posthumous. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ellul, Jacques (1964), The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson. New York: Random House. Elsaesser, Thomas (2004), ‘The New Film History as Media Archaeology’, CINéMAS, 14: 2–3, pp. 71–117. Ernst, Wolfgang (2003), ‘Telling versus Counting? A Media Archaeological Point of View’, Intermédialités, 2 (Autumn), pp. 31–44. Ernst, Wolfgang (2005), ‘Let There Be Irony: Cultural History and Media Archaeology in Parallel Lines’, Art History, 28: 5 (November), pp. 582–603. Flusser, Vilém (2000), Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans Anthony Matthews. London: Reaktion Books. Flusser, Vilém (2002), Writings, trans. Erik Eisel, ed. Andreas Ströhl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Forster, E. M. (1928), ‘The Machine Stops’, The Eternal Moment and Other Stories. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Gitelman, Lisa (2006), Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Goble, Mark (2010), Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Gompertz, Will (2020), ‘The Machine Stops: Will Gompertz Reviews E. M. Forster’s Work’, BBC News, 30 May, (last accessed 28 July 2020). Greenberg, Clement (1939), ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, Partisan Review, 6, pp. 34–49. Guillory, John (2010), ‘Genesis of the Media Concept’, Critical Inquiry, 36 (Winter), pp. 321–62. Hankins, Gabriel (2018), ‘We Are All Digital Modernists Now’, Modernism/modernity Print Plus, 3, Cycle 2 (August 7), (last accessed 17 January 2022). Haraway, Donna (1991), ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Routledge, pp. 149–81. Hayles, N. Katherine (2017), Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Unconscious. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, Martin (1977 [1954]), ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row. Huyssen, Andreas (1986), After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jaffe, Aaron ,Michael F. Miller and Rodrigo Martini (2021), Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism. London: Bloomsbury. Joyce, James (1957), Letters of James Joyce, vol. 1, ed. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Viking. Keane, Damien (2014), Ireland and the Problem of Information: Irish Writing, Radio, Late Modernist Communication, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

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Kenner, Hugh (1987), The Mechanic Muse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kern, Stephen (1983), The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kittler, Friedrich (1999), Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kracauer, Siegfried (1995 [1927]), ‘The Mass Ornament’, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 75–88. Latour, Bruno (2005), Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lippmann, Walter (1991 [1922]), Public Opinion. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Lodhi, Aasiya and Amanda Wrigley (2020), Radio Modernisms: Features, Cultures and the BBC. London: Routledge. McLuhan, Marshall (1962), The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McLuhan, Marshall (2001 [1964]), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Routledge. McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore (1967), The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. New York: Bantam Books. McLuhan, Marshall and Eric Norden (1969), ‘Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media’, Playboy, 16: 3 (March), pp. 53–74, 158. Mansell, James (2017), The Age of Noise in Britain: Hearing Modernity. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Mao, Douglas and Rebecca Walkowitz (2008), ‘The New Modernist Studies’, PMLA, 123: 3 (May), pp. 737–48. Marcus, Laura (2007), The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marcuse, Herbert (1964), One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon. Marx, Leo (1964), The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morrisson, Mark (2016), Modernism, Science and Technology. London: Bloomsbury. Mumford, Lewis (1967), Technics and Human Development: The Myth of the Machine, Vol. 1. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Mumford, Lewis (1970), The Pentagon of Power: The Myth of the Machine, Vol. 2. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch. Murphet, Julian (2009), Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American AvantGarde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Napolin, Julie Beth (2020), The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form. New York: Fordham University Press. North, Michael (2005), Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press. North, Michael (2009), Machine-Age Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parikka, Jussi (2012), What is Media Archaeology?. London: Polity Press. Perkowitz, Sidney (2020), ‘Only Disconnect! A Pandemic Reading of E. M. Forster’, The Nautilus, 83 (26 March), (last accessed 28 July 2020). Pressman, Jessica (2014), Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pryor, Sean and David Trotter (2016), Writing, Medium, Machine: Modern Technographies. London: Open Humanities Press.

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Purdon, James (2017), ‘Literature—Technology—Media: Towards a new Technography’, Literature Compass, 15: 1, pp. 1–9. Rosner, Victoria (2020), Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ross, Shawna (2016), ‘Introduction’, in Reading Modernism with Machines, ed. Shawna Ross and James O’Sullivan. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–13. Ross, Shawna (2018), ‘From Practice to Theory: A Forum on the Future of Modernist Digital Humanities’, Modernism/modernity Print Plus, 3, Cycle 2 (7 August), (last accessed 17 January 2022). Ross, Stephen and Jentery Sayers (2014), ‘Modernism Meets Digital Humanities’, Literature Compass, 11: 9, pp. 625–33. Sale, Stephen and Laura Salisbury (2015), Kittler Now: Current Perspectives in Kittler Studies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Simondon, Gilbert (2017 [1958]), On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cecile Malaspian and John Rogove. Minneapolis: Univocal. Ströhl, Andreas (2002), ‘Introduction’, in Vilém Flusser, Writings, trans. Erik Eisel, ed. Andreas Ströhl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. ix–xxxvii. Tichi, Cecelia (1987), Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Trotter, David (2007), Cinema and Modernism. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Trotter, David (2013), Literature in the First Media Age: Britain Between the Wars. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wallace, Jeff (2005), D. H. Lawrence, Science, and the Posthuman. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. White, Eric (2020), Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic: Avant-Gardes, Technology and the Everyday. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Williams, Raymond (1972), ‘The Technological Society and British Politics’, Government and Opposition, 7: 1 (Winter), pp. 56–84. Williams, Raymond (1974), Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Fontana. Williams, Raymond (1981), ‘Communication Technologies and Social Institutions’, in Contact: Human Communication and Its History, ed. Raymond Williams. London: Thames and Hudson, pp. 226–38. Williams, Raymond (1989), ‘When Was Modernism?’, New Left Review, 175 (May–June), pp. 48–52. Wollaeger, Mark (2006), Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Part I Machines

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1 Electricity: Technologies and Aesthetics Laura Ludtke

I

n the first movement of Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s 1928 gender- and genrebending novel set in Elizabethan England, night is marked by an absence of light.1 For Woolf, darkness was the predominant experience of night in the seventeenth century; instances of nocturnal illumination only demonstrate the inherent fallibility of light. The introduction of the electric light does not occur in the novel at the time of its advent in the late 1870s, but in 1928, the moment in which the novel’s final movement is set. Woolf employs electric lights to signal the close of a very long nineteenth century and herald the belated beginning of the twentieth century. Orlando is astonished by the convenience of the instantaneous illumination of ‘a whole room’, of ‘hundreds of rooms’ at ‘a touch’. Not only was ‘the sky [. . .] bright all night long’ but so too were ‘the pavements’ (Woolf 2008: 283). This proliferation of artificial illumination across the city distinguishes ‘the present moment’ from that preceding it. Orlando’s new world appears more vibrant and vital; ‘[t]here was something definite and distinct about the age’, something modern (Woolf 2008: 284). Following Woolf’s example, we take for granted that the electric light was an accepted object and, indeed, symbol of modernity. But was this still the case, fifty years after the first commercially viable electric lights were introduced in London’s streets? As one of electricity’s most prominent and prevalent technologies, the electric light is entangled with an elision of technology and modernity and of modernity with modernisation. But electricity, electric lights and modernity are not interchangeable. Graeme Gooday challenges the presumption that ‘electrification and modernization are integral features of the same phenomenon, and thus that electricity is synonymous with modernity’ (Gooday 2008: 14–15). The orthogonal processes of domestication and modernisation were neither assured nor easily accomplished; before the electric light could become an object of modernity and, in turn, a modernist object, it needed first to be romanticised ‘as both an upper-class luxury and a mysterious magical force’ and anthropomorphised ‘as benign fairy, goddess, wizard or imp’ (Gooday 2008: 19). In Britain, this process was hampered by overt literary resistance to the electric light. Robert Louis Stevenson exemplifies this resistance in his 1878 essay ‘A Plea for Gas Lamps’, in which he decried the ‘new sort of urban star now shin[ing] out nightly, horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye’ (Stevenson 1928: 231). But it is also evident in Hilaire Belloc’s satirical ‘Newdigate Poem’ from 1894–96, which used roteseeming heroic couplets and a belaboured iambic pentameter to subvert the so-called ‘benefits of the electric light’ by rendering them in bathetic terms (Belloc 1910). Works embracing the electric light, such as H. G. Wells’s 1899 novel The Sleeper Awakes or Richard Marsh’s 1897 novel The Beetle, tend to be popular and genre fiction rather

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than literary (Ludtke 2020; Dobson 2017). In modernist fiction, this resistance manifests in Woolf’s depiction of electric lights in her novels Night and Day (1919) and Mrs Dalloway (1925). In Night and Day, the intimate drawing room in the prominent Hilbery family’s home in Chelsea is contrasted with the small Bloomsbury flat of the suffragist Mary Datchet. While the drawing room is distinguished by its romantic, sociable illumination, ‘all silver where the candles were grouped on the tea-table, and ruddy again in the firelight’, in Datchet’s flat, ‘[t]he unshaded electric light shining upon the table covered with papers’ renders the ‘small room [. . .] extremely concentrated and bright’ (Woolf 2009: 4, 83). Of the numerous instances of artificial lights in Mrs Dalloway, set in post-war London, only the lights in the kitchen, where Mrs Walker frantically prepares the supper for Clarissa’s party, are explicitly electric, distinguished by their excessive glare. In keeping with the Dalloways’ social status and class conventions, the formal rooms in which the party takes place are lit with ‘candlesticks’, while the back garden is festooned with ‘fairy lamps’ (Woolf 2000: 140; 145, 162). In both novels, the electric light delineates existing divisions between generations and social classes. Of course, not all modernist writers were averse to or resisted depicting the electric light. In Dorothy Richardson’s The Tunnel, published in 1919 but set in the early 1890s, Miriam Henderson’s work in the dentists’ practice is illuminated by a ‘single five candle-power bulb, drawn low and screened by a green glass shade’ (Richardson 1979: 72). Richardson frequently uses artificial light across her Pilgrimage novel sequence to establish (or transgress) boundaries between personal and shared or public spaces. In E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howards End, while Aunt Munt suggests the intrusion of electric light from a neighbour’s unshaded window will bring about destruction of privacy (and propriety), Margaret sees the ‘electric-light globes blossoming in triplets’ in Mr Wilcox’s offices at the Imperial and West African Rubber Company as a sign of his family’s corporate values and their attraction to modernity for modernity’s sake (Forster 2000: 51, 157). Electric lights abound in John Cournos’s 1922 novel Babel and establish a stark contrast between pre-war London and New York. In London, electric lights are ‘dingy’ and ‘tired’, and in Soho, known for its nightlife, they are used alongside gas lamps to mitigate the city’s distinctive fog, whereas in New York, Broadway is ‘the Milky Way of man-created universe’: everything is electrified – from a cat playing with yarn on a sewing machine to a lady brushing her teeth in her boudoir – and, thus, commodified (Cournos 1922: 99, 133, 368). In Aldous Huxley’s 1923 novel Antic Hay, Theodore Gumbril recalls with melancholy the lighting restrictions of the Great War imposed to protect Londoners from zeppelin raids, when ‘the electric moons above the roadway were in almost total eclipse’ (Huxley 2004: 74). The great variety of electric illumination represented in modernist fiction, of which these are only a few examples, is a testament to the fact that electrification and modernisation were protracted and asymmetrical processes. This chapter explores these connections between electricity, its technologies and aesthetics in early modernism. While its primary focus is a period spanning from 1910 to 1922, it draws connections between this time and the last two decades of the nineteenth century to demonstrate that the relationship of electricity and modernism is as much one of discontinuity as it is of continuity. By challenging the ‘revolutionary’ status of electrical technologies in what is ostensibly an ‘age of electricity’ we can begin to disentangle the association of modernity with electricity and its technologies.

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This chapter examines three different examples of this interconnection: the first traces the sense of vagueness inherent to the electrical analogies Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis use to establish Vorticism as a literary and artistic movement back to the electrical debates of the late nineteenth century; the second relocates T. S. Eliot and Mina Loy’s deliberate eschewal of the electric light in their early poetry in the context of the tropes of urban observation of that same period; and the third reconsiders the status of Giacomo Balla’s painting The Street Lamp and Loy’s lampshade designs in the materialist electrical aesthetics established by Italian Futurists Umberto Boccioni and F. T. Marinetti in their manifestos.

An ‘Age of Electricity’ Electricity, as well as its many associated technologies, is frequently conceived of as being paradigm-breaking. In his influential study The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918, Stephen Kern refers to the period of cultural and technological change with which he is concerned as an ‘age of electricity’.2 Electrical technologies – the telegraph, electric light, telephone and radio – seemed instantaneous and allowed users to feel as though they were transcending space and time (Kern 1983: 15; 114). Kern asserts that the electric light, in particular, ‘challenged’ the accepted belief that time was both linear and constant because it was singularly responsible for ‘a blurring of the division of day and night’ (Kern 1983: 29). However, it is more accurate to suggest that electricity represented a form of technological continuity rather than of discontinuity. As Carolyn Marvin contends, electricity was accorded a revolutionary status only in comparisons made between its advent and that of the steam engine in the eighteenth century. In such comparisons, ‘the work of electricity was presented as continuing the work of the past’, effectively ‘revers[ing] the usual meaning of revolution as a decisive break with the past’ (Marvin 1988: 206). Where electric lighting is concerned, its introduction into cities such as London tended to reproduce the networks of illumination and systems of distribution already in place for gas lighting and heat. The process of electrification was as much about converting users to adjacent and similar technologies as it was about convincing them to adopt new, unparalleled ones. Moreover, the critical tendency to single the electric light out as a revolutionary technology arises from a flattening of such technological nuances and chronology. In attending to the electric light, it is important to recall that the technologies available in the early 1880s (arc and filament lamps) differ greatly from those of the 1890s (incandescent lamps), let alone those of the 1910s (neon tube and glow lamps), the 1920s (electric automobile headlamps) and the 1930s (floodlighting). While we tend to locate the ‘age of electricity’ as spanning the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth, it is a much longer history, beginning with initial experiments with arc lighting in the 1840s and extending to the establishment of regional utilities and transmission systems – the National Grid in Great Britain (1926–46), the ‘Shannon Scheme’ in Ireland (1929) or the Tennessee Valley Authority in the United States (1933–9) – in the 1930s and 1940s. These initiatives are often seen as belated projects of modernisation (Hughes 1983: 352–62, 294–8; ESB 2020), but it was not until the early 1930s, when these projects facilitated the ‘mass consumption of electricity’, that electrification could finally be conceived in terms of modernity (Gooday 2008: 16). Electricity and its technologies,

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therefore, are neither ‘ephemeral’ nor ‘eternal’ in the Baudelairean sense (Baudelaire 1964: 13), nor do they align with the Benjaminian conception of the modern as what is ‘new in connection with that which has always already been there’ (Benjamin 1999: 1010 (G, 8)). If anything, the electrical revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a conceptual not a technological paradigm shift. Despite the prevalence of electricity and its technologies in the late nineteenth century, there was still widespread uncertainty about electricity’s nature in technological as well as theoretical terms. For Gooday, the ‘recurrent positing of the question “what is electricity?”’ is not linked to ‘a mass outbreak of metaphysics’ in the general public, but is due to the successive introductions of ‘new kinds of electrical technology’ over a period of forty years (Gooday 2008: 59). Electrical technologies developed and introduced in the 1840s (telegraphy), 1850s (electrotherapy), the late 1870s (early arc and incandescent electric lighting) and the late 1880s (electric heat and power from a central supply) represented a series of conceptual disruptions for the general public that resulted in a recurrent uncertainty. In this context, while ‘the work of electricity’ was far from novel, as Marvin asserts, the workings of electricity certainly were.

Electric Matters In his 1913 essay ‘The Serious Artist’, Ezra Pound describes poetic inspiration as ‘a sort of energy, something more or less like electricity or radioactivity’ (Pound 1954: 49). This simile is replete with the language of inexactitude and suggests a lack of knowledge about the topic. But Pound had a sophisticated understanding of electricity, energy and the ether, and knowingly incorporated scientific language into his poetry and criticism (Nänny 1973; Bell 1981; Kayman 1986; Kenner 1987). His conception of energy, for instance, was shaped by Hudson Maxim’s popular treatment of the conservation of energy in The Science of Poetry and the Philosophy of Language, which he reviewed in 1912. And, when developing the central concept of Vorticism, he drew on Helmholtz’s vortex theory as also popularised by Maxim (Bell 1981: 27, 161, 160–1). Pound’s familiarity with contemporary electrical science – or at least popular iterations of it – indicates an awareness with one of the field’s major unresolved concerns: the question of what, precisely, electricity was. Appreciating the power behind this uncertainty, Pound and Lewis harnessed the indefinite and indeterminate nature of electricity as analogies, similes and metaphors conveying a conception of creative potential and influence that distinguished them from their predecessors and avantgarde competitors. Determining the nature of electricity dominated many avenues of scientific and technological enquiry in the nineteenth century (Gooday 2008: 37–59; Marvin 1988: 10–11, 56–62; Nye 1990: 138–84). With the discovery of electro-magnetic waves, the electron, X-rays; the development of wireless telegraphy, the induction motor and other electrical technologies; and the performance of experiments relating to the luminiferous ether and the speed of light, electrical science was at the centre of scientific innovation in the 1890s and early 1900s (Daly 2010: 283). Debates took place across many registers and between different factions, involving scientists, mathematicians, electrical engineers, electrical promoters, popularisers of science, historians of science and, indeed, lay persons. There was little agreement as to whether electricity was an energy, a force or some kind of matter, but the divisions were most

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pronounced between those who were interested in conducting experiments to discover the properties and behaviour of electricity and those who wanted to exploit electricity (and its applications) as a commodity (Gooday 2008: 38). All parties were united in their desire to know, in their respective fields, whether electricity was material or immaterial. For potential providers and consumers, whether electricity was a ‘material commodity’ or an ‘ethereal mystery’ mattered because it determined whether and how it could be measured, distributed and priced (Gooday 2008: 38). At the highest register, physicists and engineers contested the existence of the ether, an ‘imponderable medium’ first conceived as a conceptual aid to understanding how invisible substances, effects or forces (such as light, heat, electricity and magnetism) travelled across distances in space (Luckhurst 2002: 85–91). The debates of the late nineteenth century did not decisively conclude in the early twentieth century and, in the mind of the general public, the desire to know the precise nature of electricity was supplanted by biddable vagueness of great potential. Wyndham Lewis drew on this indeterminacy in his essay ‘A Review of Contemporary Art’, which opens with a forceful comparison between French Cubism, Italian Futurism and English Vorticism. While Futurist art was ‘swarming, exploding, burgeoning with life’, Vorticist painting was ‘electric with a more mastered, vivid vitality’ (Lewis 1981: 38). It is not immediately evident what it means to be ‘electric’ or to have ‘a more mastered, vivid vitality’, only that these concepts are important to the Vorticist aesthetics he establishes. Instead of clarifying, he offers another divisive, scientific analogy that compares contemporary European painting with ‘the laboratory of an anatomist’, where subjects are continually examined and dissected, setting it at odds with the true ‘objective’ of painting, which should be to capture life and to ‘profess [. . .] some kind of energy’ (Lewis 1981: 39). As with Pound’s ‘sort of energy’ in ‘The Serious Artist’, the abstractness of Lewis’s ‘some kind of energy’ is an effective if oblique analogy because of its indefiniteness. Lewis’s essay was first published in the July 1915 issue of the Vorticist magazine Blast (also known as Blast 2 or the ‘War Number’) alongside Pound’s poem ‘A Dogmatic Statement on the Game and Play of Chess’, which enacts some of the ideas about energy and poetic creativity Pound articulates in his critical writing. When read in this context, Lewis’s use of terms like ‘electric’ and ‘energy’ need not be understood as abstract but as contributing to the magazine’s larger strategy to define Vorticism as distinct from contemporary avant-garde movements (Hatherley 2010; Klein 2013). At the same time, Pound’s verse lines, which have the effect of a massing vortex (Logemann 2013: 86), respond to Lewis’s call for art to consist of ‘lines and masses’ that ‘imply force and action’ (Lewis 1981: 44). Patricia Rae connects Pound’s use of energy in the poem more explicitly with his critical discussion of poems as ‘“sources” of energy’ in general and, in particular, with his establishment of a ‘scientific poetics’. Vorticist poets aspire, she explains, ‘to represent a cluster of associated percepts [sic], ideas, and emotions whose origins remain unknown’. They achieve this representation through the ‘Image’, Pound’s term for the poetic technique more often associated with Imagism, but which Rae here identifies as a ‘second use of the term’ to mean ‘the interpretive or absolute metaphor’ (Rae 1997: 94, 95). This ‘Image’ – a metaphor of the vortex and its tumultuous energy – distinguished the Vorticists in both their insistence on linguistic and metaphoric unconventionality and their experiments in form (Whitworth 2010: 190, 146). If, as the electrical debates of the late nineteenth century established, the nature of electricity was unknowable or,

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at least, indefinite, then electricity and its related topics are a powerful source upon which the Vorticist ‘Image’ can draw.

Light Verse Also published in the second issue of Blast, T. S. Eliot’s iconic city poem ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ depicts one of the most prominent and memorable lights in modernist verse (Eliot 1963: 16–18). To convey the lamplight’s aural resonance in the streetscape of his memory, Eliot introduces a synaesthetic analogy in which each street lamp’s ‘beats’ are like ‘a fatalistic drum’. Given the electric and energetic analogies Pound and Lewis deploy in their contributions to this issue, we might expect Eliot to do the same, particularly in his depiction of the street lamp. Yet the lamp’s anthropomorphic attributes – it ‘sputtered’, ‘muttered’ and ‘hummed’ – evoke gas, not electric lighting. When considered alongside other representations of the city in Blast 2 – woodcuts such as Frederick Etchells’s ‘Hyde Park’ and Helen Saunders’s ‘Atlantic City’ or travelogues like Jessica Dismorr’s ‘London Notes’ and Lewis’s longer ‘The Crowd Master’ – ‘Rhapsody’ fits less obviously in the magazine’s Vorticist programme. Indeed, Eliot’s depiction of urban illumination and the nocturnal street scene disrupts our expectations about what forms of lighting are depicted in early modernist verse and how. Writing to John Hayward on 9 September 1942, Eliot explicates the linguistic origin of his synaesthetic analogy, indicating that ‘any reference to the reverberes [. . .] wd. take the mind directly to pre-war London’ (Eliot 2015: 1:420).3 Here, ‘reverberes’ refers both to the poem’s lamps and to their beats, since the French noun réverbère (from the Latin verbere, ‘to beat’) obliquely alludes to a style of reflector common to late nineteenth-century gas lamps. But the connection Eliot makes with pre-war London in this contextual paratext effectively (mis)directs readers away from the earlier French origins of the term. Although electric lights were becoming increasingly common, gas lighting remained the predominant form of street lighting in pre-war London (Inwood 2005: 292; Hughes 1983: 227–61). Reflectors were used with gas street lamps and pre-date the advent of electric lighting, but in the early twentieth century were more commonly associated with electric lights because they could mitigate the effects of glare produced by electric lights, especially arc lamps (Bowers 1998: 195–200; Otter 2008: 224). However, the pre-history of the reflector coincides with early public illumination initiatives in late eighteenth-century Paris and antecedes the introduction of gas street lighting in early nineteenth-century London.4 Introduced in the late 1780s, réverbères were a form of ‘oil-powered reflector [lamp]’ hung intermittently above the city streets (Conlin 2013: 180–7). The reflectors diffused a more ‘generalized illumination’ (Otter 2008: 194). But, as well as making city more visible and ‘expos[ing] actions to public vision, legibility, recognition, or shame’ (Otter 2008: 194), this form of early public illumination enabled artists and authors to begin capturing the city at night (Conlin 2013: 185, 187). With its beat-like exhortations to look (‘regard’) and to notice (‘remark’) punctuating the three images around which the speaker’s memory of the nocturnal perambulations are structured – the woman, the cat and the moon – Eliot’s street lamp connects with a tradition preceding Baudelaire’s figure of the urban observer: the flâneur (Baudelaire 1964: 9). Relocating Eliot’s lamp-beats in their historical context foregrounds the rich illuminary past underpinning the linguistic and allusive innovation

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of his analogy. But it also destabilises the poem’s proximity to the Vorticists’ concern with pre-war and wartime London. Indeed, the poem’s disjunction with the tenets of Vorticism becomes more apparent when it is placed in conversation with Mina Loy’s chronically overlooked poem ‘Café du Néant’. Soaked in morbid, Symbolist imagery (disembodied eyes, the ephemeral flame of a candle, ‘decomposing’ fruit), ‘Café du Néant’ offers an alternative treatment of the belatedly decadent Paris Eliot portrays in ‘Rhapsody’ (‘a dead geranium’, ‘the ‘twisted branch upon the beach’, an eroded skeleton) (Loy 1997: 16–17; Eliot 1963: 16–18). First published in The International in August 1913, the poem recalls the café scene in Montmartre, where Loy lived from 1903 to 1907 (Bozhkova 2019: paras 4–5; Prescott 2017: paras 6–14; Burke 1996: 177, 185–6). Whereas Eliot’s lamps give a sense of the vastness of the desolate streets, Loy’s ‘Little tapers leaning lighted diagonally’ and ‘leaning to the breath of baited bodies’ seated at the macabre café’s ‘coffin tables’ render its claustrophobic atmosphere even more funebrial. Eliot’s street lamp instructs the speaker to ‘“Regard that woman / Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door / Which opens on her like a grin.”’ Both speaker and reader in Eliot’s poem become complicit in the lamp’s glaring gaze, which reduces the exposed woman to her perceived bodily imperfections: we note ‘“the border of her dress [. . . is] torn / and stained with sand”’ and how ‘“the corner of her eye / Twists like a crooked pin”’. Loy juxtaposes the ‘harmonious’ and (implicitly) gradual decay of the ‘brandy cherries / In winking glasses’ with the sudden and utter ‘putrefaction’ of a cabaret performer, caught up in the intensity of the stage’s ‘concentric lighting’, which has been ‘focussed precisely on her’. In a moment of precipitous disenchantment, the lights lay bare life’s literal and metaphorical transience (Prescott 2017: 13–14). Here, Loy’s lights do not just reveal the tawdry and unforgiving physicality of life; they destroy it. The decision not to portray the electric light as the subject or, indeed, object of their respective poems is not symptomatic of a modernist eschewal of electric light. Rather, because electric lights proved exceedingly resistant to the process of romanticisation, they were not suited to Loy’s and Eliot’s respective poetic strategies to ironise the nocturnal lightscape – in ‘Café du Néant’ the candle becomes a ‘Synthetic symbol LIFE’ and in ‘Rhapsody’ the street is ‘Held in lunar synthesis’. Moreover, the melancholic and moribund lightscapes depicted in each poem – defiantly not ‘profess[ing . . .] some kind of energy’ but a sort of entropy – are antithetical to the Vorticist (and Futurist) aesthetics.

Electrical Aesthetics Bursting with life and light, Giacomo Balla’s iconic painting The Street Lamp exemplifies the aesthetics of the electric light established by the Italian Futurists in the second decade of the twentieth century. The painting marked a shift in Balla’s style and attention towards the Futurists’ interest in concepts of speed, technology, violence, the industrial city and energy. But how much did it represent a break from the agricultural and crafts-focused work he exhibited at the Rome Esposizione Internazionale in the autumn of 1911? For, despite its association with Umberto Boccioni’s The City Rises (1910), which depicts workers renovating the central power plant in Milan, the painting remains closely connected with Balla’s earlier work, The Worker’s Day (1904–7), through a continuity of subject-matter: urban illumination (Rainey et al. 2009: 309; Poggi 2009: 117). The painting bears the date 1909, although Balla probably

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painted it between 1910 and 1911, with the majority of the work being undertaken in late 1911, bringing into question its position in the early chronology of the Futurist movement. And, while it was listed in the catalogue for the Exhibition of Futurist Paintings at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris in 1912, it was not actually among the works on display (Poggi 2009: 117). Indeed, Balla was only loosely affiliated with the Futurists proper at the time: he was a signatory to Boccioni’s ‘Technical Manifesto: Futurist Painting’ in 1910, but remained more closely associated with Divisionism when working on the painting in 1911. The painting’s exaltation of light – electric light – as a dynamic manifestation of both speed and technology proved irresistible to the Futurists, who eagerly and anachronistically implicated him in their movement. But, as these inconsistencies reveal, Balla and his painting had an ambivalent relationship with early Italian Futurism – an ambivalence that arises from their unique understanding and representation of light as both a visual phenomenon and a technology. The Futurists championed electric light as a form of poetic and ideological iconoclasm which sought to destroy sentimental lunar aesthetics and symbology, evident in F. T. Marinetti’s exhortation to ‘murder the moon-light’ in the prose poem accompanying ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’, as well as Boccioni’s reverence for ‘the glare of electric lamps’ in the ‘Technical Manifesto’. In their ‘repudiation’ of ‘Passéist Venice’, Marinetti, Boccioni, Carlo Carrà and Luigi Russolo call for ‘the reign of divine Electric Light [to] finally come to liberate Venice from its venal moonlight’ (Marinetti et al. 2009: 68). In place of the moon, they wanted ‘electric lamps with a thousand rays of light that can brutally stab and strangle the mysterious shadows’ (Marinetti et al. 2009: 68). Reflecting on the painting’s significance in 1954, when it was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Balla explains that he obtained ‘the dazzle of the light [. . .] by means of the combination of pure colours’. He feels its originality was due to the ‘scientific’ techniques he applied ‘to represent the light by separating the colors that composed it’ (Chessa and Russolo 2012: 36). By emphasising the aesthetics of the light over the aesthetics of the lamp as technology, Balla aligns his work with the Futurists’ interest in the quality of the electric light. From a strictly technological perspective, the Futurists’ attraction to the destructive intensity of this light is intriguing because it suggests an interest in a particular form of electric light: the arc lamp, which was one of the first commercially viable forms of electric lighting and was known for the power and absoluteness of its illumination. But, by 1911, while its glaring aesthetics were instantaneously recognisable, arc lighting was no longer a novel technology. Although its original Italian title, Lampada ad Arco (‘the arc lamp’), has been simplified in translation as The Street Lamp or Street Light, Balla’s painting explicitly portrays these aesthetics, locating it in a particular historical moment. The more generic translations efface the technological specificity of Balla’s original title and suggest a uniformity in street lighting that did not exist during that period. Arguably, the electric arc lamp is less disruptive as a technology than the techniques Balla uses to represent it visually – techniques he deploys to translate the contemporary uncertainty about the nature of electricity into an electrical aesthetics. Attending to such nuances unsettles the intimacy between technology and modernity often implied by Futurist aesthetics to reveal an ambivalence greater than that exposed by this rereading of Balla’s Lampada ad Arco. The aesthetics of the electric arc lamp also offer a point of intersection between Balla’s painting and Futurism worth troubling a little further so that we can draw out their illuminary nuances.

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Up until this point, we have not really addressed the issue of distinguishing the electric light as a technology from electric light as a visual phenomenon, nor acknowledged the extent to which these two concepts have been elided culturally as well as linguistically. This elision is not the result of an aversion to representing technology; rather, it reveals an imbrication of technology and a phenomenon unique to electric light facilitated by the light’s singular lack of flame. The elision is evident in Balla’s Lampada ad Arco, but culminates in Pablo Picasso’s 1937 oil painting Guernica, where the light that emanates from the shade covering the iconic eye-shaded incandescent bulb is depicted like rays from the sun and is contrasted with the purely symbolic kerosene lamp brandished by the woman protruding through an open window.5 Picasso simultaneously fractures the relationship between perception and perspective, and destabilises the relationship between the technology of light and its illumination. Here, the electric light has superseded even the sun – an extreme step for even Balla and the Futurists, who wanted only to challenge our sentimental attachment to the moon. In its depiction of electric light outshining the moon (the putative triumph of technology over nature), Balla’s painting can be seen as a visual analogue for Marinetti’s 1909 prose poem ‘Let’s Murder the Moonlight’, wherein the ‘three hundred electric moons’, powered hydroelectrically, ‘cancel’ out ‘the ancient green queen of love’ (Marinetti 2009: 59). The viewer struggles to separate out the flecks of light curving away from the lamp’s globe from the surrounding matter in a manner similar to the visual effect described by Boccioni, wherein ‘a street pavement that has been soaked by rain beneath the glare of the electric lamps can be an abyss gaping into the very center of the earth’ (Boccioni et al. 2009: 65). He thought it possible for the light to annihilate not only the moonlight, but space as well. The Futurists’ aesthetics were such that they preferred a dominating and destructive light that ‘exceed[ed] the data of vision’ (Rainey et al. 2009: 309). But Mina Loy, who was more of a Futurist outsider than a Futurist proper, saw another way to elide technology and visual phenomenon in her take on early modernist electrical aesthetics: the lampshade. When Loy arrived in New York from Florence in late 1916 as an enigmatic figure of the avant-garde, she began to fashion lampshades, not to function as a supplement to her poetry and art, but to sustain her. She had long been interested in the decorative arts and was fascinated by the German Jugendstil lamps and glass she saw at the Secession shows while living in Munich in the 1890s (Burke 1996: 56). For Loy, as for Baudelaire, the boundaries between fashion and art were permeable: thus, glare was not problematic, but a possibility. Loy’s early lampshade designs featured ‘old-fashioned sailing ships’ and projected images on to surfaces like ‘a magic lantern show’ (Burke 1996: 224). Far from being ‘modern’, Loy’s lampshades from this period evoke the visual tropes of the late nineteenth century (Potter 2018: 47–68). In their construction, however, using Cellophane and other ephemeral materials, her shades exceeded the innovation of their Victorian antecedents, which were often made of patterned silk, a material preferred for its durability, elegance and convenience (Gordon 1891: 36, 46). Making lampshades was an activity traditionally undertaken by women, but the status of Loy’s shades as objets d’art (Burke 1996: 227; Hayden 2018: 73) contravenes the gendered binary underpinning Alice Gordon’s bourgeois expectation that the (mostly) female readers of her 1891 manual, Decorative Electricity, ‘divide [their] electric lights into two classes, the practical and the decorative’ (Gordon 1891: 16).

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Loy returned to making lampshades in Paris in the mid-1920s, assembling whole lamps from flea market finds in ‘every conceivable shape’ (Burke 1996: 340–1). This time her efforts were more conventionally commercial: she had a wealthy if unpredictable business partner and a small shop on the rue du Colisée on the city’s expensive Right Bank. One of her most popular designs, ‘L’Ombre féerique’ (magical or fairy shadows), gestures not just to the enchantment of the magic lantern show, but also to representations of electric light as fairies or fées in the early 1900s. Following the success of the shop’s first season, Loy’s designs proved a hot commodity; in 1928, they were imitated, mass produced and sold by competitors who wished to capitalise on her originality. And yet, although her designs were reproduced and proliferated, few of Loy’s original shades survive, only further confirming their ephemerality as modernist objects. The aesthetics of Loy’s lampshades rely on the layering of transparent, semitransparent and opaque materials, as well as on the interplay of light against the materials – or, indeed, if we conceive of light as a form of matter as Boccioni did, through the materials and permeating the surrounding matter. In an article in the Daily Telegraph from October 1929, Loy is credited with inventing a ‘substitute’ for glass –‘verrovoile’ – that produced a ‘new lighting effect’. This discovery is billed as ‘revolutionising [. . .] the artificial flower and lamp-shade industry’ (White 2020; Expert 1929).6 While the material ‘diffuses light perfectly’ and could be used to create lampshades, its more unique property was its plasticity: before it solidified it was pliable and could be shaped into any form. Unlike the light radiating freely from Balla’s unshaded arc lamp, Loy’s ‘verrovoile’ shades could harness light’s creative potential, transforming, shaping and enveloping the light cast through them. As a ‘new medium’ that could be moulded into old or familiar shapes, ‘verrovoile’ subverted the electrical aesthetics established by the Futurists. Crudely translated as glass-silk, Loy’s own term for her innovative ‘artificial glass’, ‘verrovoile’, conveys a sense of delicacy and softness but also frangibility – a counterpoint to the violent masculinity associated with Italian Futurism and an important contribution to the electrical aesthetics of early modernism. In an ‘age of electricity’, it is unsurprising that early modernist writers and artists engaged imaginatively with its ideas and terminology, its analogies and aesthetics. Electricity represented the greatest potential, through its many applications and proliferation, to transform modern life. As this chapter demonstrates, despite critical tendencies to treat of electricity and its technologies as inherently modern, transformative and shocking, the early modernists were less invested in electricity’s status as ‘new’ or ‘revolutionary’ than their predecessors. And, while the precise nature of electricity is not readily knowable (even in the twenty-first century), at the beginning of the twentieth century, early modernists understood and exploited this indefiniteness for their own ideological and aesthetic purposes. Vorticists like Pound and Lewis drew on electrical analogies in their critical and poetic work to articulate their conception of creativity and to differentiate their avant-garde movement from their competitors. Futurists like Balla, Boccioni and Marinetti advanced material theories of energy and electricity in their manifestos, poetry and paintings. Those adjacent to the avant-garde or at its extremities, figures such as Eliot and Loy, further troubled the already contentious relationship of electricity and modernity by revisiting, repeating and revising the illuminary tropes and innovations of the late nineteenth century and, indeed, in the case of Eliot’s réverbères, even the late eighteenth century. Loy’s lampshades, however,

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are the most interesting modernist object to consider because of their many contradictions. For, while her ‘fairy shades’ were romanticising, not modernising, figures and, in that respect, continued the romantic history of the electric light, her use of innovative materials enabled her to shape and manipulate the electric light’s most transient aspect: its light.

Notes   1. This book chapter would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of Rachel Crossland, Michael Whitworth, Shelley King, Alexander Lewis and this volume’s incisive editors: Alex Goody and Ian Whittington. The chapter is also the work of a precarious scholar who has, over the course of its composition and publication, had four different institutional affiliations and two periods of under- and unemployment (one of which was during a global pandemic).   2. Before Kern used the phrase ‘age of electricity’ in The Culture of Time and Space, it was the title of a series of articles by the engineer William Preece, published in Time in 1882, as well as of Park Benjamin’s 1886 popular monograph on electricity.  3. These sorts of interventions were common practice in Eliot’s private correspondence (Dickey 2020).   4. There were no similar initiatives in London until the early nineteenth century.   5. E. Luanne McKinnon provides an extended analysis of Picasso’s use of light in this painting in her dissertation (2015).   6. I am grateful to Alex Goody for drawing my attention to this particular source.

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2 Clocks: Modernist Heterochrony and the Contemporary Big Clock Charles Tung

Modernist Clockwork

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ike the Cyberdyne Systems model 101 cyborg in James Cameron’s The Terminator who suddenly materialises in a crackling time-displacement sphere in 1984 Los Angeles, the machine-human entity in E. V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man appears abruptly in the middle of a cricket match in an English village, having time-travelled to 1923 from 8,000 years in the future. In Odle’s text, which Brian Stableford and David Langford call ‘the earliest major cyborg novel’, this future human is ‘capable of going not only someplace but also somewhen’, because a special kind of clock has been implanted in his brain (Stableford and Langford 2018; Odle 1923: 90). By means of this internal ‘mechanical contrivance’, the clockwork man is not locked in the world of mechanistic linearity but freed from it – the clock allows him to access ‘a multiform world . . . a world of many dimensions’ (Odle 1923: 180, 146–7). While the novel’s anxieties about the cyborg’s loss of humanity tilt the narrative’s sympathies toward the ‘Makers’ rather than their clockwork, toward humanist finitude and freedom over slavish mechanism, The Clockwork Man also seizes ‘upon the clock as the possible symbol of a new counterpoint in human affairs’, a device for thinking beyond the usual conception of historicity and its limitations, the ‘old problems of Time and Space’ (Odle 1923: 80). Odle’s character Gregg, who considers the clock as an element in the final stages of human development, remarks that the ‘clock, perhaps, was the index of a new and enlarged order of things’, a symbol of speculative insights beyond what ‘his limited faculties could perceive’ (Odle 1923: 110, 111). As an index of the order of things, the clock appears so frequently in early twentiethcentury cultural production that, as Michael Levenson has said of the trope’s encompassing theme of temporality, ‘it can be taken as a cultural signature’ (Levenson 2004: 197). However one calculates the exact bookends of canonical modernism, the period’s time obsession lands squarely within what the historian Alexis McCrossen claims was ‘the height of the public clock era in the United States and indeed throughout the world’ (McCrossen 2013: 6). As her book, Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life, demonstrates, this apex of public time occurred from the 1870s to the 1930s, during which an estimated 15,000 new public clocks were erected across the US, with countless extensions of official order appearing on walls, desks and mantelpieces. Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift focus on an earlier span (1300–1800) in their history of timekeeping in England and Wales,

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in order to track the slow rise of the late medieval public clock and the historically specific complex of practices constituting public time. While they contest narratives of clock time that posit a technologically determined monolithic entity, their work in Shaping the Day underlines how the dominant account of clock time is tied to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industry and capitalist production, imperial control and urbanisation (Glennie and Thrift 2009: 42–53). During this period, according to E. P. Thompson’s foundational account, the transition in England ‘to mature industrial society’ placed the clock at the centre of new manufacturing techniques and practices of supervising labour, ways of creating efficient ‘time routines’, and an experiential and cultural ‘time-sense’ produced by ‘technological conditioning’ (Thompson 1967: 79–80). Citing the ‘deadly statistical clock’ of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times – the ‘emblem of Thomas Gradgrind . . . “which measured every second with a beat like a rap upon a coffin-lid”’ – Thompson cast the clock as the figure of a ‘rationalism [that] has grown new sociological dimensions since Gradgrind’s time’ (Thompson 1967: 96). Thus, rather than signifying ‘a new and enlarged order of things’, the clock has most frequently come to stand for the opposite – a strict and homogeneous order, a narrowing and regimenting world of quantification, regulation and uniformity. The dominant critical narrative surrounding the clock in modernist texts centres so much on their subjectivist antipathy to these devices that we could easily designate the early twentieth century in literature as the height of the private anti-clock era. As Theodore Ziolkowski once put it, in virtually every case . . . the clock is summoned forth as a negative symbol by the subjective consciousness of an individual who wishes to assert his own private time against the claims of public life. Clocks in modern literature seem to exist only to be ignored, dropped, shattered, deformed. (Ziolkowski 1969: 188) While Randall Stevenson’s more recent study almost fifty years later makes space for ‘modernist temporalities . . . beyond mind altogether’, modernism remains largely under the rubric of ‘time in the mind’: although writers move ‘along a spectrum of possibilities’ between the two poles of subjective time and ‘time on the clock’, they nevertheless ‘shifted their priorities – towards mind rather than machine . . .. “Time on the clock”, after all, inevitably remains a “time in the mind” itself . . . impossible to expunge completely from consciousness’ (Stevenson 2018: 122). Even with Stevenson’s deft flexibility in his comprehensive account of imaginative engagements with regimented public time, his account gravitates toward what Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) called ‘the queer element of the human spirit . . . the timepiece of the mind’ (Woolf 2006: 72). Woolf’s novel has served, as David Leon Higdon points out, as ‘the twentieth-century locus classicus’ for the idea that, ultimately, ‘publicmechanic-objective-clock time merits less attention than private-subjective-organicpsychological time’ (Higdon 1976: 52). While I do not wish to dismiss or downplay the critical strengths and affective power of the dominant reading of the clock, the figure of the timepiece – in modernist literature and in the strain of contemporary culture which extends rhizomatically from it – also suggests a new heterochronic order. In this enlarged order of things, one clock implies the existence of others marking different histories and governing varying

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scales. In this way, the device of the clock – literary and literal – functions to remind us that, as Glennie and Thrift remark, ‘clocks are not a general instrument. Instead clocks operate in many networks of practices at once . . . [and] are assemblages of signs and things’ (Glennie and Thrift 2009: 73–4). Indeed, as they argue, ‘what we call time is an ungainly mixture of times – unfolding at different speeds in different spaces – which intersect and interact in all manner of ways’ (66). In this chapter, I would like to argue likewise that clocks are not (only) a general symbol. Rather, across the long twentieth century, clocks have in many cases functioned as a symbolic technology that makes explicit the assemblages of cultural machines into which the image of the timepiece is plugged. As the operation of this image comes more frequently to serve the theme of planetary disaster, the machinic character of big clocks in cultural discourse, such as the Doomsday Clock and the Clock of the Long Now, tells time in ways that James Purdon would call ‘technographic’ – a mode that ‘seeks to bring to consciousness the technicity of text and the textuality of technics’ (Purdon 2018: 7). In the zone of ‘the mutual mediation of technology and literature’, the big clocks that emerge from the proliferation of clocks from modernism to the present become part of a counter-infrastructure supporting the production of temporal defamiliarisation and historiographic estrangement (Purdon 2018: 7). In this sense, big clocks are clockpunk machines, which, from the perspective of Jussi Parikka’s media archaeology, unearth anti-teleological possibilities buried in obsolescence, and which help to generate alternative histories and historical alternatives (Parikka 2017).

The Machine of Modernity, the Machinic Assemblage of Clocks Representations of timepieces in canonical modernism are famous for their hostility toward modernity, of which the clock is not only the master symbol but also the central instrument in its technological infrastructure. Consider Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), based on the actual anarchist plan in 1894 to blow up the prime meridian and the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, whose operations had come to stand for the coordination of modern life at a distance (the synchronisation of clocks on ships and in train stations). A decade earlier, at the 1884 International Meridian Conference, the machinery and clockwork of Greenwich had successfully helped to establish the universal day based on the mean solar time in a borough of Britain’s capital city, London. In James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), a novel organised around, among other things, different kinds of timing, Leopold Bloom observes that Dublin’s ‘timeball on the ballast office’ is tied to Greenwich (invented by the Royal Navy to synchronise marine chronometers, timeballs usually dropped from observatory towers, where ships off shore could see them). Bloom’s chain of inferences suggestively connect his observation that Dublin’s ‘clock is worked by an electric wire from Dunsink [Observatory]’ to the techno-political idea that the city and the format of its citizens’ lives are plugged directly into the larger nets and networks controlled by London. The parallactic temporal distance between Dublin and London was twenty-five minutes up until the Easter Rising in 1916 (Joyce 1986: 137). Following these well-known literary representations, equally famous critical accounts of timepieces likewise foreground this humanist antipathy to the clock’s symbolic and material–infrastructural functions. Starting with the most recent, John Durham Peters’s account of clocks and ‘sky media’ asserts that ‘the watch is the prime

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symbol of modernity, a time bomb marking our Faustian mortgage of ourselves’ (Peters 2015: 225). As Jimena Canales points out, whereas clocks once ‘were symbols of a universal order maintained and set in motion by God himself’, modern clocks had begun to produce and literally mark a new, homogeneous, inhospitable temporality that had significant ‘human costs in terms of lived time’ (Canales 2016: 115, 114, 123). Those costs measured the distance between a humanist valorisation of lived experience and the dehumanising machinery of modernity. Lewis Mumford’s oft-quoted passage from Technics and Civilization that claims that the ‘clock, not the steam engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age’ reaches back to earlier analyses of the unnatural construction of clock-time units in the historical circumstances underlying the West’s progressive vision of itself (Mumford 1934: 14–15). In 1847, Karl Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy had figured ‘the pendulum of the clock’ as a measure of value that effaces the human, such that ‘Time is everything’ and a human being becomes ‘nothing . . . no more than the carcase of time’ (Marx 1910: 57). In 1923, citing this particular indictment of ‘the subordination of man to the machine’ (57), Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness described the capitalist ‘process of labour’ in factories as ‘rational mechanisation extend[ing] right into the worker’s soul’ – a process in which the clock ‘freezes’ and ‘fragments’ the ‘qualitative, variable, flowing nature’ of human temporality ‘into abstract, exactly measurable, physical space’ (Lukács 1972: 88, 90). In modernist studies, scholars have tended to anchor opposition to the clock in their commitment to the particular temporal textures of subjective life. Against such particularity and uniqueness were the large-scale changes generated by new technologies of transport, communication and coordination, which depended on clock time as ‘the most ubiquitous of modern technical infrastructures . . . deeply embedded in scientific, cultural, institutional, economic, and military realities’ (Mackenzie 2001: 236). Clocks were necessary to plan the efficient movements of bodies, messages and products – on the factory floor, in urban spaces, in military operations, over telegraph and wireless networks, on marine trade routes, across passenger and commercial train tracks. If modernity entailed these efforts to eliminate lag and waste through precise timing and synchronisation, then much of the art and thinking that falls under the banner of modernism provides a poignant contrast in which duration is the major counterterm to the clock, a durée not defined quantitatively as a span or length, but rather as a qualitative, dynamic, vitalist flux. While late nineteenth-century engineers like Sanford Fleming had successfully advocated for the standardisation of time based on a single prime meridian – a universal ‘civil time’ that, as Adam Barrows puts it, transformed ‘the earth itself into a perfect cosmopolitan clock’ – the dominant account of modernism has usually located cultural resistance to this clock-time world in Henri Bergson’s redefinition of time as interior states of consciousness that ‘melt into and permeate one another’ (Barrows 2011: 32; Bergson 1913: 104). For Bergson, the clock was precisely the wrong symbol for time, since its operations were essentially spatial and therefore negations of the temporal. As he wrote in 1889, ‘the pendulum of the clock cuts up into distinct fragments and spreads out, so to speak, lengthwise the dynamic and undivided tension of the spring’ in exactly the same way that the frozen ‘simultaneities of physical phenomena’ – of things that exist in space as opposed to processes unfolding – chop up our ‘inner life in which succession implies interpenetration’ (Bergson 1913: 228). While true duration for Bergson is ‘nothing else but the melting of states into one another’, clock time comprises the

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detemporalised subdivisions of durée into spatialised, homogeneous points: ‘When I follow with my eyes on the dial of a clock the movement of the hand which corresponds to the oscillations of the pendulum,’ he argued, ‘I do not measure duration . . . I merely count simultaneities’ (Bergson 1913: 107–8). His valorisation of vital duration with its repudiation of the clock seems to inform many, if not all, of the scenes and styles of melting, flowing, fragmentation and spreading out in modernist literature. The ambiguity of modernism’s representations of the clock have long been seen in modernist studies as expressing the twentieth century’s larger ambivalence toward the technological culture of modernity – a tension marked by the retreat to organic subjectivity or the Futurist celebration of ‘the extension of human powers in the machine’, on the one hand, and the critique of ‘the totality of industrial civilization . . . as depersonalised and empty’, on the other (Armstrong 2003: 165). No doubt literary modernism engaged this ambivalence between the ‘mechanical, monotonous clock-face of time’ and the vital fluctuations of human life and subjectivity (Lawrence 1998: 483), but it also explored another ambivalence: on the one hand, ‘the clock’ conceived rightly as the symbol of modernity and its technical infrastructure for imperial and capitalist coordination based on a singular time, and on the other hand, the rise of many clocks, understood as the symbol of non-subjective temporal multiplicity. Bergson’s public debate with Albert Einstein in 1922 made this second ambivalence clear. In Einstein’s twin paradox, one twin on earth and one twin travelling at high speeds would discover upon their reunion that the earthbound twin had aged much more. In countering Einstein’s special relativity, Bergson’s understanding of simultaneities had refused to give up the correspondence between the clock and the subject, whereas Einstein’s understanding of the now in which one checks the clock corresponded not to the subject but to frames of reference. For Bergson, ‘“to know what time it is” consists in finding a correspondence, not between one clock and another one, but between one clock and the present moment, the event which just passed’ for the person checking the time (Bergson 1972: 1344).1 By contrast, as the astrophysicist Adam Frank puts it, ‘under the physics of relativity, all measures of simultaneity are frame-dependent’: Einstein destroyed ‘the intuitive idea – hardwired into our brains’ – not only that the now is defined in relation to subjective becoming, but that ‘only one “now” exists’ (Frank 2011: 146). ‘There can be no universally recognised, simultaneous present, no “now” for all creation’, because different clocks tick at different rates in different reference frames (Frank 2011: 136). As Einstein wrote in 1905, in his famous paper ‘On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies’, we cannot attach any absolute signification to the concept of simultaneity . . . two events which, viewed from a system of co-ordinates, are simultaneous, can no longer be looked upon as simultaneous events when envisaged from a system which is in motion relatively to that system. (Einstein et al. 1923: 42–3) In Relativity: The Special and General Theory, Einstein demonstrated that ‘as a consequence of its motion the clock goes more slowly than when at rest’ and that a second ticked off on one clock does not equal one second on another – if a ‘clock is moving with the velocity v’, then ‘the time which elapses between two strokes of the clock is not one second, but seconds, i.e., a somewhat larger time’ (Einstein 1920: 44). As Peter Galison argues, Einstein’s work in the patent office in Bern shows up clearly

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in his theory of special relativity, which made use of ‘some of the most symbolised mechanisms of modernity’ – trains, wires, synchronisation devices – to work through the problem of non-simultaneity with respect to clocks at a distance, ‘precisely the practical, technological issue that had been racking North America and Europe for the last thirty years’ (Galison 2003: 255, 256). While practical adjustments could be made for the time of signal transmission necessary for the correspondence determining simultaneity, the ‘new enlarged order of things’ that Odle attributes to ‘a multiform world’ is an order with no ‘single overarching Newtonian cosmic time’ (Frank 2011: 133). What remains, as Frank describes it, is only ‘a relativistic patchwork of times, each measured by observers moving relative to one another’ (Frank 2011: 134).

The Enlarged Order of Heterochrony Thus, the symbolic value and material operations of the clock that I wish to underscore here link the clock not to Time (with a capital T and in the singular) but to other clocks, to the profusion of clocks in twentieth-century cultural production and beyond, to a non-subjective, non-humanist network of temporal multiplicity that we might call heterochrony. The hostility toward modernity inscribed in the cultural presence of the clock, in other words, is not anchored solely in subjectivist concerns to protect humanist visions of unquantifiable temporality, but also, and with equal importance, in the political–historiographic objection to modernity’s aggressive institutionalisation of a single clock. On the very first page of Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps, Galison provides what I think is one of the clearest descriptions of Odle’s new order of ‘the clock as the possible symbol of a new counterpoint’: In Einstein’s electrotechnical world, there was no place for such a ‘universally audible tick-tock’ that we can call time, no way to define time meaningfully except in reference to a definite system of linked clocks. Time flows at different rates for one clock-system in motion with respect to another . . .. ‘Times’ replace ‘time’. (Galison 2003: 13) Another way of reading the clock in this period, then, is as a symbol and synecdoche for clocks in the plural, for a situation in which ‘we can very well imagine as many clocks as we like’ (Einstein and Infeld 1938: 190). Heterochrony is a useful name for this pluralisation of times, because it captures the coexistence of unsynchronised difference as well as the otherness of entire reference frames beyond individuals. In ‘Of Other Spaces’, Michel Foucault briefly used this term to describe the way heterotopias’ archival temporal collocation functioned as an ‘absolute break . . . with traditional time’, the way certain sites seem to ‘enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes’ in defiance of Newtonian time’s assignment of elapsed events to a definite position in the past (Foucault 1986: 26). But the better angle on this term comes from its original use by Ernst Haeckel in 1875 in the context of evolutionary developmental biology: here heterochrony signified deviations from the fiction of a master ontogenetic clock, which was thought to have governed the unilinear progress of embryonic development wherein every adult stage of a species’ evolution is replayed in the individual organism. The fiction that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in this way was destroyed by the aberrations Haeckel himself

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observed, and such deviations in the rate of embryonic processes are now seen as the engines of evolutionary variation itself. Thus, heterochrony is not the figure for the exception that proves the rule of unilinear development, which Haeckel believed was the case, but is rather the signifier of the machinic assemblage of desynchronised timings of organ development that alter the morphological unity of the present. Many clocks in modernism are heterochronic in that ‘the time’ or the present they reference is a tissue of disjunctive timings and anachronistic phenomena, a clash of time-telling devices and times. Woolf’s Orlando investigates temporal relativity not simply because of the multiple selves that occupy any seemingly individual person, but also because her work’s ‘difficult business – this time-keeping’ acknowledges the ‘sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously in every normal human system’, which scales up to different times within any seemingly non-subjective present (Woolf 2006: 223). Mrs Dalloway makes it clear that Woolf’s London is a space in which multiple clocks and very different histories are not in step with each other. The clocks that preside over the novel’s action – Big Ben, St Margaret’s, Rigby and Lowndes, Harley Street’s – might appear to signify exclusively the unification of all the characters’ lives within the regular and regularising pulse of empire, nation, commerce and medicine, but they also point to the divergence of a number of different social, economic and political histories, represented primarily by Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, but also arguably by Doris Kilman’s position, Elizabeth Dalloway’s access to new futures and Mr Bentley’s daydream in Greenwich of Einstein and the desire to get outside one’s reference frame. In Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, while the Compsons’ pocket watch and broken kitchen clock relentlessly keep the time that measures the family members’ failures to keep pace with different trajectories of development (sexual, existential, social, economic), the clocks also point to a range of different coordinate systems in which time is elapsing differently. The clocks in the jeweller’s shop epitomise this heterochrony: the eldest brother, Quentin Compson, sees in the shop window ‘a dozen watches’ showing ‘a dozen different hours’ (Faulkner 1994: 54). The shop’s loud, contradictory ticking underlines, even where there is overlap and intersection, the stark differences and lag among the histories evoked by the African American characters on mules and streetcars, Southerners on trains and in cars, North-to-South telegrams and the New York stock market. Heterochronic clock images – from modernism to the mantelpieces in George Pal’s The Time Machine (1960) and Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future (1985) – and the aspiration to the condition of weird time-telling draw on the tendency of the clock to become or imply many clocks (Figure 2.1). Even without Einstein, the mechanical clock worked to reveal the time’s number, rates and scales as often as it symbolised the coercive regularity of a monolithic modernity. Against the consolidation of a single metric for the coordination of empire and the quantification of capitalism, the heterochronic clock revealed the irregularity of planetary rotation, the imperfection of regimenting mechanisms and the historicity of the isotopic and isochronic space-time fictions that tried to conjure nature to their schemes. Even as the synchronisation network expanded across steam pipes, telegraph wires, mobile phone masts and fibre-optic cables, as well as commercial, scientific and cultural institutions, many clocks continued to produce and reveal heterochronic difference. These disparities of multiple clocks were and are not primarily about playful, dialectic-destroying difference, but about the disjunctive tensions among different timescales that reconfigure the site of politics and historical intervention.

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Figure 2.1  The Time Traveller’s mantel clocks in George Pal’s The Time Machine, 1960, and Doc Brown’s dresser clocks in Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future, 1985.

Big Clocks The planetary clock is a trope and a device that is often understood to tell an ultimate time, to assert the most basic horizon for all other forms of time-telling, and to reduce the discordance and disjunctiveness of multiple clocks and timescales to the one inexorable line for reckoning environmental morbidity and species mortality. In this respect, the ticking of the clock of first modernity, which governed the short-term coordination and distribution of goods, is absorbed into the ticking of the big clock of second modernity, which, as Ulrich Beck theorised, is concerned to manage the long-term and large-scale ‘hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernisation itself’ (Beck 1992: 21). The big clock of ecological risk is the mechanism for thinking forward to the arrival of dangers set in motion by the history and networks that had produced the ‘one, true, “cosmopolitan” time of modernity’ (Barrows 2011: 102). For instance, the Doomsday Clock, which was invented at the end of the Second World War by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, functioned to register our proximity to a midnight or zero hour of nuclear extinction (Figure 2.2). In the age of nuclear criticism, the culmination of techno-scientific development in nuclear war was a clock narrative that produced a negative universality in which, as Molly Wallace points out, all were asked to imagine ‘the future’s nonexistence’: the Doomsday Clock was the figure for ‘the possibility that there would be no future’, for the fact that time itself would be annihilated (Wallace 2016: 6, 4). Similarly, the Clock of the Long Now, a massive clock designed to last 10,000 years, is meant to shift all of humanity’s short-term focus to the ultimate timeline of extinction and species death. Since ‘ten thousand years is about the

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Figure 2.2  The Doomsday Clock on the cover of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 1947, and the staircase inside the Clock of the Long Now, 2011. age of civilization’, the clock’s technical–symbolic function is to ‘measure out a future of civilization equal to its past’ (Long Now Foundation n.d.). The history that begins with the invention of agriculture is thus only half-way done, and human civilisation finds itself at a crossroads, faced with the choice of an alternative to ‘the short-horizon perspective that goes with burgeoning market economies (next quarter) and the spread of democracy (next election)’: since ‘Now is the period in which people feel they live and act and have responsibility . . . we need things that give people a sense of the long now’ (Brand 1999: 133). However, in both cases, the Doomsday and Long Now clocks reveal not only the tendency to collapse different social rhythms into the one true time of the planet, but also the presence of multiple temporal orders that must be reckoned with (rather than abandoned), if the course of planetary history is to be altered. With respect to the misleading aspects of the Doomsday Clock, Wallace points to the difficulty of reading ‘its face . . . [which now ought to measure] different scales of the temporality (and, indeed, spatiality) of risk’ (Wallace 2016: 17). She argues that the ‘Clock might better be conceived, then, not only as a countdown to some potential future annihilation, but also as . . .. syncopating a present that contains multiple catastrophes, historical and to come, simultaneously’ (17). Similarly, while the Clock of the Long Now attempts to synchronise human efforts with the survivalist measures that have tuned out all nonessential rhythms, its operation will reveal heterochronic disjunction amid its wellcrafted, theme-park historicising. When the Clock’s projected visitors walk through the attraction’s giant internal ‘clock mechanics’, ranging from fastest (‘tick[ing] once

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per day’) to slowest (measuring ‘the equinoxes, a 25,784-year cycle’), the journey through the gears raises questions about the variety of timescales that overlap but refuse to nest fully within what Srinivas Aravamudan calls catachronism – the unification of time in which the entirety of the line until now becomes the simplistic causal track headed toward ‘a future proclaimed as determinate’ (Aravamudan 2013: 8). As a self-congratulatory project that will have led to human survival, the Clock’s ties to Disney historicism (Hillis’s work at Disney Imagineering) and to Amazon.com (Jeff Bezos is now helping to fund the project) reveal how the catachronic theme-park thrills of short-term delivery systems for goods and texts function as a giant distraction. What they distract from are the necessary engagements with the disjunctive historicity in which the operations of capitalist temporal horizons do not simply disappear in the zoom-out to a planetary timeline of human civilisation. Big clocks – clocks that may or may not be physically large but whose symbolic scope or infrastructural connections are mammoth – have a history that attests to this kind of zooming out in which all times are nested within one time. Thomas Allen argues that monumental clocks in the nineteenth century projected ‘grand temporal visions inspired by problems of population, by the need for narrative structures to manage the movement of people as populations across historical time’ (Allen 2015: para. 4). Such visions informed the aesthetic refocusings from the domestic time-spaces of liberal subjectivity to the collective destiny of human populations. It is for this reason that the clock that Edward Curtis famously removed from his 1910 photograph ‘In a Piegan Lodge’ can be seen as a big clock. In this staging of indigeneity, the presence of the clock is both a synecdoche and a metaphor for the time-telling of human civilisation in which indigenous peoples were actively ‘disappeared’ from history. The image from the original glass negative reveals what Curtis felt was the intrusive presence of the clock between the two seated figures, which disrupted the ‘Indianness’ of the picture’s constructed present (Gidley 2001: 51). In a later photograph included in Volume 6 of The North American Indian, Curtis had manipulated the image in the photogravure process, retouching the clock out of existence, in some sense a guilty erasure of the evidence of the violent settlercolonial presence in the histories of indigenous peoples, specifically that of the Blackfoot Tribe. However, ‘clocks were relatively common among the Blackfeet once the tribe had become settled on reservations’, as Shamoon Zamir writes, and by eliminating all signs of the violence of deculturation, Curtis presents a historiographically seamless moment of ‘the Indian’ and ‘the premodern’ that simultaneously affirms the existence of the big clock operating elsewhere, and preserves the unitary conception and monolithic nature of US, world and human history from which ‘the Indian’ is excluded (Zamir 2014: 56). Starting with Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other (1983), the critique of the disappearance of smaller clocks into the largest, or their exclusion from the universal timeline of human development, tends to repudiate allochronism, the ‘denial of coevalness’ of ‘others’, the refusal of the simultaneity of non-Western peoples in the ethnographic present of white anthropology (Fabian 2014: 33). In her reading of Curtis’s denial of the clock, McCrossen discusses in general ‘the extent to which federal buildings and timepieces were meant to . . . reinforce racial hierarchies’ and mentions a late nineteenth-century architectural design for a US Post Office building and clock tower (McCrossen 2013: 150). On the outside of the official government building and the clock tower, as Lois Craig notes, stands ‘a parade of ethnic stereotypes’, who ‘marvel at the splendour of the federal presence’ (Craig 1984: 166). Here,

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as in Curtis’s segregation of a romanticised indigeneity from the time of civilisation and history, McCrossen articulates very clearly the standard reading: Anglo-Americans came to believe that other peoples lacked a sense of time, or if they had one, that it was a ‘primitive’ time sense. . . . Without clock time various states of savagery were certain. Living in time was an indicator of civilization, so much so that photographers and other ethnographers of ‘primitive’ peoples sometimes removed evidence of watch and clock ownership from their records. (McCrossen 2013: 150) The big clock of ‘the human’ relegates all others’ histories to the position of exteriority or anteriority. Today, the ambition to be included in the one true time of history and human civilisation can be seen as a capitulation to the self-serving and aggrandising imperial/ settler fantasy of a singular timeline. Stuart Brand’s book on the Clock of the Long Now argues for the scaling up of the present by pointing out that Now is the period in which people feel they live and act and have responsibility. For most of us now is about a week, sometimes a year. For some traditional tribes in the American northeast and Australia now is seven generations back and forward (175 years each direction).

Figure 2.3  Edward Curtis’s ‘In a Piegan Lodge’, 1910, and the architectural design for a US Post Office building with clock tower in the Annual Report of the Supervising Architect of the Treasury Department, 1888, reprinted in Lois Craig’s The Federal Presence, 1984.

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However, the Long Now that supersedes and subsumes these nows is the ultimate timeframe necessary to save the species and the planet, on which his and Hillis’s Clock is mean to refocus our attention (Brand 1999: 133). While the need for rescaling the present is not wrong, the conception that there is really only one time that matters, and that this time is a neutral big tent for the coeval dwelling of times themselves, reasserts ‘the apocalyptic understanding of time underlying Western modernity’, ‘the traditional apocalyptic temporality’ that Diletta de Cristofaro ascribes to the Doomsday Clock. For de Cristofaro, this big clock locks time into dystopian or utopian teleological schemes rather than fostering the ‘critical temporalities’ that reveal the function of such apocalyptic revelations (de Cristofaro 2018: 2; 2020: 6–7). Zamir’s reading of Curtis’s erasure of the clock, which was owned by the Blackfeet subjects themselves (Little Plume and Yellow Kidney), is that the photographer’s gesture ‘violates not only the two Native Americans’ agency but also the imperative of documentary verity on which the ethnographic project rests’; that the original picture containing the clock documents is ‘a deep and multiple temporality . . .. The lodge exists within or, better, contains within itself, at least two distinct regimes of time, the time of a non-Native American modernity and the time of Piegan culture’ (Zamir 2014: 60). Zamir’s reading of the Piegan lodge as an almost science-fictional space striated by different times speaks to the way in which the present is being retheorised as the site of many other clocks, the clocks of others. For instance, in Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination, Mark Rifkin argues that the effort to revise our accounts of history and the present – to be more inclusive and to offer ‘temporal recognition’ – upholds the settler-colonial fantasy of a neutral, unified history and ubiquitous modernity, the ‘singular temporal formation that itself marks the sole possibility for moving toward the future’ (Rifkin 2017: 15). What has appeared as a critical gesture to ‘always historicise’ has never been neutral because it presumes that ‘the dominant coordinates of Euramerican sociality and governance still provide the basis through which to register processes of becoming’ (10). Indeed, Rifkin makes use of Einstein and clock systems in order to emphasise non-subjective reference frames whose ‘material existence and efficacy . . . are not reducible to a single, ostensibly neutral vision of time as universal succession. The concept of frames of reference’, he argues, ‘provides a way of breaking up this presumed timeline by challenging the possibility of definitively determining simultaneity while still holding onto the potential for thinking about collective experiences of time’ and sovereign temporal formations (20). Contemporary work on indigenous times and futures is crucial for rethinking the relations among the multiplicity of clocks – figured variously and relatively in size and shape – and for reconceptualising the new and the alternative in a context governed by the urgency of ultimate clocks. In this context, we must reconfigure alternativity not simply as the product of an explosive event within history, in which a radical break ushers in the absolutely new, but as a function and calculation of differently paced, non-synchronous but often intersecting lines. Time in modernism is not defined solely by the big fateful clock nor by the myriad subjective temporal registers found everywhere in twentieth-century literature, but also by the multiplication of clocks, by the vitality, sovereignty, vampiric dependence and zombie-like persistence of many times. The strain of heterochronic modernism that connects to certain kinds of big clock and to contemporary critiques of settler imaginaries of the end of civilisation shifts from objects and ruins of the past to different pasts

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and timelines themselves. As in ‘media anarchaeology’, where ‘technological dead ends, lost histories, circuitous routes, and alternative conceptions’ reveal singular time to be a variantological medium comprising different times (Apperley and Parikka 2018: 352), the presence of the heterochronic clock from modernism to the twenty-first century signals not just the motley fabric of pastiche but the science-fictional scenario of coeval times and histories running through the texture of the present, various timepaths that parallel and intersect with big history without being reduced to it. In the register of postcolonial theory, the image of the heterochronic clock radicalises the nature of anachronism from chronological discrepancy to discrepant chronologies that reveal the present as a transverse construction in which, as Aravamudan puts it, we engage ‘the multiple futures that exist in the now’, rather than yield to ‘the tyranny of a totalised now that purportedly leads to a singular future’ (Aravamudan 2001: 351). When powered by modernist clockwork, the big clock of human civilisation and the time of the planet – the clock that seems to preside over scenes of an ultimate fate, an absolute break and temporal reset, and even over omega-point fantasies of the death of time itself – ticks in a most peculiar way. The enlarged order of modernism’s clocks reveals not only that time is elapsing differently in different reference frames, but also that the present and the experience afforded by it are shot through unevenly with a variety of temporal rates and scales. Ian Baucom describes this enlarged order as ‘History 4°’, a ‘fourth order of history’ that, in the face of the catastrophes generated by a 4°C increase in temperature, does not collapse the ‘multitemporal ontology of the present’ into apocalyptic unilinearity (Baucom 2014: 142, 123). Building on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s historiographic scaling up from the ‘History 1’ of European modernity and ‘History 2’ of others’ disruptive, out-of-joint historicity, Baucom sees ‘History 3’ as Chakrabarty’s more recent attempts to theorise the disjunctive relationship of these histories to the Anthropocene, which requires the historian to rescale the human to the species and its collective ontological intertwinement with the nonhuman (Chakrabarty 2000; Baucom 2014: 140). These new challenges for historical narrative – the species protagonist, the phenomenological unavailability of the experience of hyperobjects, the disjunctive politics – require History 4°’s scalar historical method that recognises the ‘multiple scales, orders, and classes of time’ and fosters the ‘multiple corresponding orientations to the possibility of the (just) future fashioning of those times’ (Baucom 2014: 142). As a way of understanding the ‘braided order of time’ interweaving Histories 1, 2 and 3 together, History 4° comprises methodological insights in which one can hear the discordant ticking of modernism’s clocks. This type of big historiographic clock does not drown out or silence through unification the sound of multiple clocks; rather, it makes them audible as they resonate across what may now be a much longer modernity than we bargained for, and through a network of heterochronic timepieces in which we might discern the ‘pluridirectional’ politics, side-shadowed possibilities and heterogeneous futures of times themselves.

Note   1. I am grateful to Judith Roof and her students, especially Andrew Battaglia and Brooke Clark, in the Mellon graduate research seminar on temporalities at the Humanities Research Center at Rice University, for an excellent conversation on big and small clocks. Canales quotes this passage from Bergson (2011: 188). See also her The Physicist and the Philosopher (2015).

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Works Cited Allen, Thomas (2015), ‘Toward Endless Life: Population, Machinery, and Monumental Time’, Transatlantica: Revue d’études américaines, 1, (last accessed 18 January 2022). Apperley, Thomas and Jussi Parikka (2018), ‘Platform Studies’ Epistemic Threshold’, Games and Culture, 13: 4, pp. 349–69. Aravamudan, Srinivas (2001), ‘The Return of Anachronism’, MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly, 62: 4, pp. 331–53. Aravamudan, Srinivas (2013), ‘The Catachronism of Climate Change’, Diacritics, 41: 3, pp. 6–30. Armstrong, Tim (2003), ‘Technology: “Multiplied Man”’, in A Concise Companion to Modernism, ed. D. Bradshaw. Oxford: Blackwell. Barrows, Adam (2011), The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press. Baucom, Ian (2014), ‘History 4°: Postcolonial Method and Anthropocene Time’, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 1: 1, pp. 123–42. Beck, Ulrich (1992), Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage. Bergson, Henri (1913 [1889]), Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. London: G. Allen. Bergson, Henri (1972), ‘Discussion avec Einstein’, in Mélanges. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, pp. 1340–7. Brand, Stewart (1999), The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility. New York: Basic Books. Canales, Jimena (2011), A Tenth of a Second: A History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Canales, Jimena (2015), The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein and Bergson and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Canales, Jimena (2016), ‘Clock/Lived’, in Time: A Vocabulary of the Present, ed. J. Burges and A. J. Elias. New York: New York University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000), Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Craig, Lois A. (1984), The Federal Presence: Architecture, Politics, and National Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. de Cristofaro, Diletta (2018), ‘Critical Temporalities: Station Eleven and the Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel’, Open Library of Humanities, 4: 2, pp. 1–26. de Cristofaro, Diletta (2020), The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel: Critical Temporalities and the End Times. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Einstein, Albert (1920), Relativity: The Special and General Theory. New York: H. Holt. Einstein, Albert and Leopold Infeld (1938), The Evolution of Physics: The Growth of Ideas from Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta. New York: Simon and Schuster. Einstein, Albert, Hermann Minkowski, Hermann Weyl and H. A. Lorentz (1923), The Principle of Relativity: A Collection of Original Memoirs on the Special and General Theory of Relativity. London: Methuen & Company. Fabian, Johannes (2014 [1983]), Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, repr. New York: Columbia University Press. Faulkner, William (1994), The Sound and the Fury: Norton Critical Edition, 2nd edn, ed. D. Minter. New York: W. W. Norton. Foucault, Michel (1986), ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, 16: 1, pp. 22–7. Frank, Adam (2011), About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang. New York: Simon and Schuster. Galison, Peter (2003), Einstein’s Clocks and Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time. New York: W. W. Norton.

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Gidley, Mick (2001), ‘Ways of Seeing the Curtis Project on the Plains’, in The Plains Indian Photographs of Edward S. Curtis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 39–66. Glennie, Paul and Nigel Thrift (2009), Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales, 1300–1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Higdon, David Leon (1976), ‘A Poetics of Fictional “Time Shapes”’, Bucknell Review: A Scholarly Journal of Letters, Arts and Sciences, 22: 2, pp. 50–68. Joyce, James (1986), Ulysses, ed. H. W. Gabler. New York: Vintage Books. Lawrence, D. H. (1998), Women in Love, ed. D. Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levenson, Michael (2004), ‘The Time-Mind of the Twenties’, in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, ed. L. Marcus and P. Nicholls. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 197–217. Long Now Foundation (n.d.), ‘Introduction – 10,000 Year Clock’, (last accessed 12 April 2020). Lukács, Georg (1972 [1923]), History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McCrossen, Alexis (2013), Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mackenzie, Adrian (2001), ‘The Technicity of Time: From 1.00 Oscillations/Sec to 9,192,631,770 Hz’, Time & Society, 10: 2–3, pp. 235–57. Marx, Karl (1910 [1847]), The Poverty of Philosophy: Being a Translation of the Misère de la philosophie (a Reply to ‘La Philosophie de la misère’ of M. Proudhon). Chicago: C. H. Kerr & Company. Mumford, Lewis (1934), Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. Odle, E. V. (1923), The Clockwork Man. London: Heinemann. Parikka, Jussi (2017), ‘Deep Times and Media Mines: A Descent into Ecological Materiality of Technology’, in General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm, ed. E. Hörl and J. Burton. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 169–91. Peters, John Durham (2015), The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Purdon, James (2018), ‘Literature – Technology – Media: Towards a New Technography’, Literature Compass, 15: 1, e12432, pp. 1–9. Rifkin, Mark (2017), Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stableford, Brian M. and David Langford (2018), ‘Cyborgs’, in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls and Graham Sleight. London: Gollancz, updated September 2021. (last accessed 16 February 2022). Stevenson, Randall (2018), Reading the Times: Temporality and History in Twentieth-Century Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Thompson, E. P. (1967), ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present, 38, pp. 56–97. Wallace, Molly (2016), Risk Criticism: Reading in an Age of Manufactured Uncertainties. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Woolf, Virginia (2006), Orlando: A Biography (Annotated), ed. M. DiBattista. Orlando, FL: Harvest. Zamir, Shamoon (2014), The Gift of the Face: Portraiture and Time in Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Ziolkowski, Theodore (1969), Dimensions of the Modern Novel: German Texts and European Contexts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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3 Print: Anaïs Nin’s Embodied Encounters with Print Technology Jennifer Sorensen

T

he modernist period witnessed an explosion of print technologies in terms of the variety of venues for publication, the vast circulation figures and the quantity of print forums. Faye Hammill and Mark Hussey provide a useful history of the burgeoning field in Modernism’s Print Cultures and begin by explaining how this print expansion was enabled by technological innovations (2016: 15–16). Critical conversations about the intersections between modernist literature and the print marketplace have developed as a major discourse in the ‘new modernist studies’. Building on the important work of Jerome McGann’s Black Riders (1993), Jayne E. Marek’s Women Editing Modernism (1995) and George Bornstein’s Material Modernism (2001), scholarship has grown, especially in periodical studies focused on modernist little magazines and in work on Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press (see Brooker and Thacker 2009, Keyser 2010, Green 2017, Marcus 1996, McTaggart 2010, Southworth 2010, Battershill 2019a, 2019b, Willson 2009, Staveley 2009, 2018). Extending the field beyond modernist little magazines and the Hogarth Press, Lise Jaillant’s Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry (2019) collects research analysing a large range of publishers and their roles in modernist print cultures. The theoretical approaches deployed within modernist print culture studies have become more central to the larger field, thanks to ambitious work by Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier in their edited collection Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940 and in Ardis’s special issue of Modernism/modernity (September 2012). These collections of scholarship speak to recent moves in the field away from more narrow divisions between disciplines and toward ‘convergences of periodical studies, book history, media history, and material culture studies that are enriching our understanding of modernism’s complex relationship to the media ecologies of modernity’ (Ardis 2012: v). This scholarship demonstrates how modernist print culture studies have embraced ‘the transnational turn’ in modernist studies and have expanded to consider global dimensions of modernist print cultures and to attend to intersections of race, gender and empire in the modernist print public sphere. Despite this growing field of scholarship on modernist print culture, there has been less work focused on the ‘technology’ of modernist print and on how that technology required, mediated and transformed modernist bodies. More work needs to be done, particularly in connecting modernist print cultures to the rich fields of African American print culture studies and to theories of embodiment that incorporate intersections of race, gender, ability and class. While there has been a recent explosion of fielddefining work on race and print culture, most of this work has been focused on earlier

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histories.1 Recent contributions have expanded our knowledge about the production, marketing and aesthetics of African American modernist print cultures, including M. Genevieve West’s Zora Neale Hurston & American Literary Culture (2005), John K. Young’s Black Writers, White Publishers (2006), Caroline Goeser’s Picturing the New Negro (2007) and the collection Publishing Blackness (2013), edited by George Hutchinson and John K. Young. This work speaks to a much-needed development to diversify the texts, authors and print venues that animate the field of modernist print culture studies. Indeed, modernist print culture studies needs to do more work to attend to how race intersected with the print marketplace to respond to urgent work like Urmila Seshagiri’s Race and the Modernist Imagination. Seshagiri persuasively argues that as critics we must work to ‘restore the long-obscured role of race in each writer’s explicitly modern aesthetic, and, more broadly, reveal that modernism’s worship of artistic form is inseparable from its investment in the forms of race’ (2010: 12). Modernists persistently portrayed print publication through embodied language. Virginia Woolf described working with her Hogarth Press as ‘worse than 6 children at breast simultaneously’, whilst Jean Rhys feared that the censorship of Voyage in the Dark’s ending would render it ‘mutilated’, and Jean Toomer figured the anthology publications of Cane as having ‘dismembered’ his book (Woolf 1977b: 55–66; Rhys 1984: 25; Toomer 1993: 102). These evocative descriptions hint at the intensity of authors’ and publishers’ conceptions of print publication as a visceral endeavour that was both vital and potentially violating. Print technology inflects modernist embodiment on several levels: print transforms the authorial body, produces bookish bodies and lends an embodied presence to typographical features. Modernists conceived and reconceived their work through physical and sometimes painful entanglements with print cultures. The critical conversations on modernism and bodies developed by Tim Armstrong and Sara Danius focus largely on non-print modern technologies. Danius challenges the perceived ‘anti-technological bias’ in modernist literature through her analyses of what she calls ‘technologies of perception’ (2002: 5). Armstrong argues for the centrality of bodies to the experience of modernity and to the aesthetics of literary modernism, arguing that modernity ‘offers the body as lack, at the same time as it offers technological compensation’ (1999: 3). Mark Goble (2010) has enriched the field of modernist embodiment by bringing a more explicit focus on media theory and focusing on the telegraph, the telephone and photography as communicative media. Yet for Goble, Danius and Armstrong, modernist experiences with print technologies are mostly left out of their narratives. More recent critical work on modernism’s bodies by Maren Tova Linett (2016), Rebecca Sanchez (2015) and Anne Anlin Cheng (2013, 2019) has largely focused on urgent questions of disability and race. Here, I will argue that attending to how print technologies reshaped modernist understandings of bodies can allow us to consider how, for many modernists, the act of printing and being printed was a profoundly embodied experience that could be either compensatory or fragmenting. Print offered ways to subvert or to engage with the capitalist marketplace. Print was not just one of many technologies that mediated how modernists experienced their daily lives – it was the technological mediator between their writing and their public. Virginia Woolf is the modernist writer most famous for her engagement with the technologies of print, but less critical attention has been paid to her persistently physical

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descriptions of her embodied labours at the Hogarth Press. In the fuller version of the letter to Barbara Bagenal quoted above, Woolf describes the bodily strain of typesetting through a metaphoric comparison to the exhausting imagined act of nursing six children before stressing the tangible costs of her labours in her damaged handwriting: ‘I have just finished setting up the whole of Mr Eliots [sic] poem with my own hands: You see how my hand trembles. Don’t blame your eyes. It is my writing’ (1977b: 55–6). As David Porter has demonstrated, Woolf was actively involved in ‘virtually every aspect of production, from typesetting and proofreading to finding, stitching, and sewing the covers’ (2000: 285). Indeed, the physical involvement of Woolf’s body was one of the primary motivations for acquiring the press, according to Leonard Woolf, who wrote that, ‘it would be a good thing if Virginia had a manual occupation of this kind which [. . .] would take her mind completely off her work’ (L. Woolf 1964: 233). As he imagined, the manual labour of operating the press, setting and resetting the type, stitching and gluing the covers, was very intense – with their first small hand press (set up in the Woolfs’ dining room) they could print only one page at a time. Donna Rhein has documented the physically demanding, slow, mechanical operation of the Woolfs’ first hand press (1985: 4–5). Bringing the handle down to make the impression (often called ‘machining’) required force, and Leonard and often an assistant would handle that exertion as Virginia worked to set the type in the chase. As the quotation from Virginia about her shaking hands underscores, the physical taxation of setting a page of type is quite extreme: the painstaking and arduous process involves selecting each letter or piece of type individually, placing it on the composing stick, completing each word, punctuating and spacing each line, managing the leading between the lines, maintaining pressure to avoid any accidents or spills, carefully transferring the lines to the chase, locking up the chase and finally making sure the chase is securely mounted inside the press. Rhein draws attention to the many steps required to print on paper with such a small table-top machine – a process that involved both Woolfs (and later assistants) physically bending over the machine and working in concert to produce each page. Quite soon, they acquired a larger machine to speed up the process (5). Yet even with the larger Minerva model, the Hogarth Press’s success depended on the physical effort of Leonard and Virginia. Virginia makes this embodied side of the press work palpable in a letter to Roger Fry, explaining that they ‘have been in a welter of Hogarth Press affairs, & my fingers are like cauliflowers from addressing envelopes’.2 Even Woolf’s famous statement of freedom through self-publishing is embedded in a diary entry that describes her press labours and her freedom in intensely embodied language: How my writing goes downhill! Another sacrifice to the Hogarth Press. Yet what I owe the Hogarth Press is barely paid for by the whole of my handwriting. Haven’t I just written to Herbert Fisher refusing to do a book for the Home University Series on Post Victoria – knowing that I can write a book, a better book, a book off my own bat, for the Press if I wish! To think of being battened down in the hold of those University dons fairly makes my blood run cold. Yet I’m the only woman in England free to write what I like. (1977a: 42–3) Woolf shifts from recounting the bodily sacrifice of her handwriting to using evocatively sensory language as she celebrates her escape from ‘being battened down in the

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hold’ of those ‘dons’, even the thought of which ‘makes [her] blood run cold’. Woolf figures the press as a freedom that unfetters both mind and body. Her language of commerce to denote how the physical toll of presswork has ‘barely paid for’ all that she ‘owes’ to the machine, and her multiple exclamations underscore how the freedoms she exults in cannot fully be calculated through metaphors of economic exchange. Woolf’s experiences with hand printing, typesetting, binding and running her own press emphasise the materiality of modernist print technologies and stress the embodied labours that they required. Print technology insists on messy materiality and thus resists the kinds of disembodiment or fantasies of perfect embodiment that other modern media can encourage. Emily Apter and Elaine Freedgood have emphasised how material textual approaches could achieve a critical balance between micro and macro analyses by focusing on both the material details of a text and the larger networks, markets and institutions that produce it to allow for ‘“readings” of the text [that] are both distant and close’ (2009: 140). These approaches will allow us to enrich research on print cultures, media histories of the period and theories of modernist embodiment, which have traditionally centred literature written by a small group of white men. Focusing on modernist print technology allows us to centre work by women writers and especially women writers of colour who often struggled to maintain space and control in an unwelcome print marketplace, including marginalised figures like Una Marson (editor of the journals The Keys and The Cosmopolitan Monthly Magazine) and Jessie Redmon Fauset (editor of The Crisis) (see Snaith 2014; Donnell 2003; Zackodnik 2012). In this chapter, I offer a reading of Anaïs Nin’s experiences self-publishing her Winter of Artifice in 1942. Nin remains a relatively understudied figure in modernist literature and, while there has been a small amount of criticism focused on her diaries, very little critical attention has been paid to her letterpress printing experiences. Sally Dennison offers the most sustained account of Nin’s letterpress printing experiences (1984) whilst Emily Larned provides the most thorough analysis of the aesthetics of the material forms of Nin’s handprinted books (2016). In focusing on Nin I argue here for the value of attending to how women – particularly less frequently studied women – articulated their embodied experiences with print technology and with the modernist print marketplace.3

Anaïs Nin and Letterpress Exultation Anaïs Nin served as an inspiration for self-publishers and earns the prime position of the first essay (ahead of the Woolfs’ reflections on the Hogarth Press) in The Publish It Yourself Handbook (Nin 1973). Editor Bill Henderson frames her essay with the note that ‘Anaïs Nin’s printing and publishing experiences have inspired self-publishers and small-press people for years [. . .] This Handbook exists largely because of her early inspiration and support’ (26). Sally Dennison has shown how, after several attempts to have her work published and widely circulated, Nin embraced the idea of publishing her work herself, starting with two failed attempts in 1935 and 1937. In December 1941, Anaïs Nin wrote in her diary about her disappointments trying to enter the print marketplace via traditional avenues. After listing a series of experiences that seemed encouraging of her work, but which ultimately left her without any publications that allowed it to circulate widely, Nin laments: ‘One year lost. [. . .] There is no protection for the writer. Anyone can come and say he will publish it, keep it in a drawer for a

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year, and then return it’ (175). Nin stresses her vulnerability and the sense of betrayal by agents and publishers who do not have the resources or desire to help her while also constraining her from publishing elsewhere: ‘Meanwhile I am bound not to show it to anyone’ (175). When articulating her unfulfilling experiences with trying to find a publisher, Nin describes the tension between the kind of work that she wants to write and the work that the market seems to demand. Nin articulates the demand that she sees for more traditional realist texts akin to Theodore Dreiser’s ‘old-fashioned stuffing’ and contrasts that stodgy hyperdetailed realism with her own sense of ‘modern tempo’ and the potential appetite for something ‘decant[ed]’, ‘compressed’, into a ‘meal’ (176). She converts unnecessary stuffing to essential air and food – arguing for her art as both more natural and more exciting. Nin describes using a ‘roller to squeeze out all superfluous matter’ as an agent in her creative process (176). Rollers are used to ink up the platen in letterpress printing and, thus, this image suggests that her understanding of her work was mediated by her experiments with print technology. Nin wants to imagine a market for her new style of writing and she describes the current print marketplace system as stultifying. Later in the same diary entry, Nin articulates her vision of the intellectual ruin wrought by the factory-like uniformity demanded by editors by describing ‘how to murder a writer’ (176). Unlike Woolf’s description of the Press as like ‘6 children at the breast simultaneously’, Nin figures her writer figure as male and describes the demands of the print marketplace as causing ‘impoten[ce]’ that ‘sterilizes’ through ‘falsity’ and ‘forced books’ (176). For Nin, both the market’s demands that writers conform to ‘order[s]’ like ‘the last best seller’ and the financial rewards of such ‘false situations’ prove fatal to a previously ‘spontaneous’ writer (176). Written during the Second World War, these diary entries describing her frustrations with the print marketplace are frequently interrupted by bulletins that emphasise the violent context of her writing. She follows the previous statement about how print markets murder writers with: ‘Japan Opens War on the United States. First Air Raid Over New York. False Alarm. Shock’ (1969: 176). Throughout her diary entries in the early 1940s, Nin connects her work and the materiality of her writing with the context of writing in wartime. Even her typewriter becomes a weapon of resistance against the violence of the world: Imperturbably I get my typewriter cleaned for more work because to me that means if the world loves war and destruction I won’t go along with it. I will go on loving and writing until the bomb falls. I am not going to quit, abdicate, and play its game of death and power. (1969: 177) The technology of her typewriter was not quite enough to get her work circulating to more readers; rather, it is described more as a private act of persistence. Soon after this entry, Nin moved to the technology of the letterpress as her mode of resistance to war and as a way to continue her creative labours. In January 1942, Nin writes of the press’s delivery and how she and Gonzalo More ‘borrowed a book from the library on how to print’ (1969: 181). Her description of their early attempts emphasises the painstaking effort: ‘It took me an hour and half to typeset half a page’ (1969: 181). Nin writes of the presswork as a passion project and even as ‘a marvelous cure’ that operates through ‘creation’ and ‘independence’

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and that allows Nin to escape from the harsh world of the print marketplaces with ‘publishers’, ‘rejections’ and ‘ignorance’ (1969: 181). Like Woolf, Nin also found that her experiences working at manually setting type influenced her style and literary aesthetics: ‘Typesetting slowly makes me analyze each phrase and tighten the style’ (1969: 182). Throughout her diary entries describing her work with the press, Nin echoes Woolf’s descriptions of the presswork as simultaneously physically exhausting, full of technical difficulties, and yet immensely rewarding and exciting. Nin emphasises how her body is transformed through her contact with the machine: ‘You are related bodily to a solid block of metal letters, to the weight of the trays, to the adroitness of the spacing, to the tempo and temper of the machine’ (1969: 185–6). She exults in her bodily connections to the ‘weight and solidity of metal’ and describes her possession of ‘the strength and power of the machine’ as a ‘conquest by the body, fingers, muscles’ (1969: 186). She describes how the technology of printing transforms her body, almost prosthetically, into something both more powerful and more ‘adroit’ and ‘deft’ (1969: 185, 186). This diary entry is one of many where Nin imagines the fusion of her body with the materiality of the metal type and the strength of the machine. Nin’s language of bodily transformation and mastery is implicitly poised against the unmanageable historical context of the war and her lack of control with conventional publishers. In contrast to the ‘frustrations’ and ‘anger’ provoked by the publishers who have ignored, rejected or buried her work, the printing press offers ‘concrete, definable, touchable’ ‘victories’ (1969: 186). The physicality of printing – ‘You can touch the page you wrote’ – is matched, for Nin, by a productive ‘energy’ (1969: 186). The ‘technical, mechanical problems’ of the press and its processes thus allow Nin to achieve practicable, embodied ‘solutions’ that contrast with the ‘void’ generated by publishing institutions. Nin describes how she ‘exult[s]’ in both ‘mastery’ and ‘discovery’ in her presswork and she uses italics to stress her excitement at conquering problems ‘[w]hich can be solved’ (1969: 186). Throughout her diary entries in 1942, Nin writes about the material conditions of printing – repeatedly describing early errors, listing makeshift equipment and describing her tangible experiences working with the technology. Nin theorises how engaging with hand printing makes her more attentive to the materiality of language: If I pay no attention, then I do not lock the tray properly, and when I start printing the whole tray of letters falls into the machine. The words which first appeared in my head, out of the air, take body. Each letter has a weight. I can weigh each word again, to see if it is the right one. (1969: 186) Nin describes her reconsideration of the ‘weight’ of ‘each word’ and ‘each letter’ moving between the technical mishap of the word avalanche caused by improper tray locking and the more mystical process by which the words from her ‘head’ ‘take body’. Nin’s conceptions of her own writing are transformed through this handling of the technological materiality of print. Language becomes more embodied for her as her own body becomes more and more engaged with the physical labours of operating the press. In her detailed descriptions in the diary, Nin attempts to make the working materials of her craft tangible: ‘I use soap boxes as shelves, to hold tools, paper, inks. [. . .] We study type faces while eating’ (1969: 186). Nin describes the studio as a place full of makeshift objects, where the routines of the body become absorbed into her

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engagement with the press: ‘We dreamt, ate, talked, slept with the press’ (1969: 185). She repeatedly describes how the presswork absorbs all of her energies and how the ink permeates her body: ‘We ate sandwiches with the taste of ink, got ink in our hair and inside our nails’ (1969: 185). Her fascination with the presswork reverberates throughout the diary entries as she repeatedly emphasises her exultation in the materiality of the processes and production: ‘The press mobilized our energies, and is a delight. At the end of the day you can see your work, weigh it. It is done. It exists’ (186). The language here contrasts dramatically with her earlier statements about the sterilising and desiccating atmosphere of traditional print publication. Nin describes the materiality of the finished work in direct contrast to her earlier experiences with the print marketplace when her work disappeared into a drawer and seemed like a ‘hoax’ that was estranged from her control through others who condemned her work to non-circulation, non-tangibility (176). In April 1942, Nin describes her process of setting type and printing, and again emphasises how her engagement with print technology has improved her craft as a writer. Nin’s minute breaking down of the manual processes of setting type and page counting invite the reader into the kinds of intense attention to small material objects that she values: Take the letter O out of the box, place it next to the T, then a comma, then a space, and so on. Count page 1, 2, 3, and so on. Select the good ones while Gonzalo runs the machine. Day after day [. . .] The writing is often improved by the fact that I live so many hours with a page that I am able to scrutinize it, to question the essential words [. . .] The discipline of typesetting and printing is good for the writer. (1969: 192) Here, print becomes a salutary ‘discipline’ that allows the physical processes of selecting type to enrich the writer’s quest for the ‘essential words’. The slowness of the time it takes to produce the page manually trains the writer’s abilities to ‘scrutinize’. Yet while the methodical process allows for greater discernment of her own work, Nin makes it clear that presswork is not a complete escape from the outside world; her entries vividly show the intersections between her press labours and her thoughts about her relationships and the events transpiring ‘out in the world’. Nin describes these other thoughts as an ‘undercurrent’ that one might desire to ‘annihilate’ and notes that While I typeset, the radio plays one of my father’s songs, and I am slowly, word by word, erecting the last monument to his failure as a father. To all the music from Russia, Germany, France, Spain, America, I weave the pattern of letters of metal. (1969: 192) Nin’s language casts her labours as ‘weav[ing]’ the letters and describes her actions as ‘proclaiming that the most important of all achievements is to be a human being’, which seems to conflate her labours in printing the book with the aesthetic projects expressed in it (1969: 192). Through the image of weaving, Nin casts her process of typesetting as intimately tied to her writerly productivity, her femininity and her memories. For Nin, her modernist aesthetics are crucially bound up with her experiences with technologies of printing. Nin continually interweaves her ideas about literary texts

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with the processes of the machine. She enmeshes her theory of the novel as a genre within a passage that concludes with her typesetting and watching the press’s pulse: This is what makes me rebel against the novel, which can only reveal a static fragment, freeze it, when the truth is not in that particular fragment but in continuous change. The novel arbitrarily chooses a moment in time, a segment. Frames it. Binds it. A fragment does not give us that continuously changing truth. Perhaps we cannot bear a continuously changing truth. Perhaps we have to believe there is a total truth once reached and thereafter permanent, fixed. total. The capital T on the right-hand side of the box. The regular rhythm of the machine. It is heavy for the old floor, and I see the floor curving slightly under its weight, I hear the huge pulse, and hear the creaking. (1969: 194) Nin moves from her rebellion against the novel genre as being too arbitrarily restrictive, to imagining a ‘permanent, fixed’ ‘total truth.’ Her play with the small capital typeface draws the reader’s attention to the material page of her diary entry as she draws us back into the technology of the letterpress and into the box sorting out a ‘capital T’. She moves from abstractions in her theory of the novel into the material components of printing and finally figures the ‘machine’ as strangely embodied with a ‘huge pulse’. Nin writes of her inspirations for Winter of Artifice in diary entries that are interlaced with her responses to the violence of modernity and her bodily engagement with print technologies. In the same April 1942 entry that begins with taking type sorts out of the box, Nin refers to her artistic labours and her work at the press as transformative acts of resistance to the outer world: ‘I am writing with a sensitivity which our modern world is intent on destroying, not knowing that this is the only antenna we have to our psychic nature’ (1969: 194). Nin positions herself as ‘an instrument of perception which must not allow itself to be destroyed by great violence, deafened by machine guns, calloused by harshness, though it is quite possible that I may not survive life in America’ (1969: 194). Nin’s language insistently fuses the corporeal and the mechanical: she describes herself as possessing an ‘antenna’ – which evokes an insect-like hypersensitive perceptive appendage and an inhuman technological apparatus of a radio or television antenna – and embodies an ‘instrument’ that refuses to be ‘deafened’ and ‘calloused’. Throughout the entry Nin theorises her body as at once machine-like and as embodied and vulnerable. After reflecting on the ways that she tries to resist these bodily and psychic traumas, Nin describes her bodily sacrifice to the presswork: ‘I have not spared my hands. My nails are broken. I have not spared my book. I have slashed into its imperfections. It is shorter, better focused’ (1969: 194). Again Nin emphasises the ways in which her embodied exertion at the press resonates with her intellectual labours revising her book. Her broken nails echo the passage cited earlier about Virginia Woolf’s cauliflower fingers and emblematise how letterpress technology and presswork transform the bodies of these writer–printers and mediate their relationships to their writing. Anaïs Nin provides an instructive example of a modernist writer who experienced both sides of the print marketplace – the position of empowerment and embodied labour as letterpress self-publisher and the state of vulnerability and lack of control in her dealings with mainstream presses. Later in her career, in her essay ‘The Story of My

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Printing Press’, Nin reflects back on her experiences with self-publishing and emphasises how her letterpress printing was an act of defiance in the face of an unsympathetic print marketplace: ‘In the 1940s, two of my books, Winter of Artifice and Under a Glass Bell, were rejected by American publishers [. . .] Both books were considered uncommercial. I did not accept the verdict and decided to print my own books’ (1998: 29). Nin explains that the bodily demands of presswork forced her eventually to cede control to mainstream publishers: [T]he physical work was so overwhelming that it interfered with my writing. This is the only reason I accepted the offer of a commercial publisher and surrendered the press. Otherwise I would have liked to continue with my own press, controlling both the content and the design of the books. (1998: 31) Nin’s language stresses her sense of loss of complete creative ‘control’ over her work as an unfortunate ‘surrender’. Nin echoes the kinds of trauma-invoking language that other modernists like Toomer, Rhys and Woolf used to describe their experiences with circulating in print in ways that escaped their control. Nin assesses the fundamental struggle for many modernist writers endeavouring to publish work that challenged traditions and conventional expectations. She critiques traditional publishers for their fiscal attitudes toward books that reduce art to commerce (1998: 31). Nin faults the commercial publishers for having too much power in the marketplace and for ‘disguis[ing]’ their biases and ‘impos[ing]’ their choices on readers (1998: 31). She challenges publishers’ reliance on vague (and implicitly sexist) categories of value as invalid, noting that ‘The universal quality in good writing which publishers claim to recognize is impossible to define’ (1998: 32). In contrast, Nin argues that ‘[her] books, which were not supposed to have this universal quality, were nevertheless bought and read by all kinds of people’ (1998: 32). Thirty years later, Nin casts her rejection by those publishers as leading to her transformative work with the press: ‘Today, instead of feeling embittered by the opposition of publishers, I am happy they opposed me, for the press had given me independence and confidence. I felt in direct contact with my public, and it was enough to sustain me through the following years’ (1998: 32). Her hands-on experiences with print technology allowed her to feel connected to her art and to her readers. Despite the ‘overwhelming’ physical labour, Nin ultimately treasured her engagement with printing. Nin’s experiences show how print as a technology can lead not to a greater sense of disembodiment or alienation from the work of art – but rather to a more ‘direct’, embodied and tangible connection between an author and her work and between the text and its readers. For Nin, Woolf and many other modernists, encounters with print technology required bodily sacrifices and exertion, but enabled creative freedoms, control over how their texts circulated, sustaining engagement with the production of their words, and new ways to theorise their art.

Notes   1. The 2010s have seen robust scholarly conversations about Black politics and ‘Black print’ with Early African American Print Culture (ed. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein, 2012), Eric Gardner’s Black Print Unbound (2015), the MELUS Fall 2015 ‘Special

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Issue: African American Print Cultures’, edited by Joycelyn Moody and Howard Ramsby II, and Derrick Spires’s The Practice of Citizenship (2019).   2. U of Sussex, SxMs18 Monks House Papers Letters III: Virginia Woolf, Farrell-Lubbock labelled box 72, Folder Fry, Roger. The Minerva was a larger treadle press that the Woolfs moved into the basement, allowing for more space to operate – a larger machine and chase allowed the Woolfs to print more pages at a time. Leonard Woolf biographer Victoria Glendenning documents how laborious treadling the larger machine was, citing Leonard’s reflection that, after machining for several hours, he felt ‘as though he had taken a great deal of exercise’ (2006: 209).   3. I would like to thank Claire Battershill for introducing me to Nin’s writing about letterpress through her MSA 2019 paper and for her generosity in sharing sources and in pointing me to the most relevant moments in the diary concerning Nin’s embodied experiences with letterpress printing.

Works Cited Apter, Emily and Elaine Freedgood (2009), ‘Afterword’, Representations, Special Issue on ‘The Way We Read Now’, 108: 1 (Fall), pp. 139–46. Ardis, Ann, ed. (2012), ‘Mediamorphosis: Print Culture and Transatlantic/Transnational Public Sphere(s)’, Modernism/modernity, Special Issue, 19: 3 (September), pp. v–vii. Ardis, Ann and Patrick Collier, eds (2008), Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Armstrong, Tim (1999), Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Battershill, Claire (2019a), Modernist Lives: Biography and Autobiography at Leonard and Virginia Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Battershill, Claire (2019b), ‘“Each Letter Has a Weight”: Letterpress, Literary Composition, and Women Author-Printers’, unpublished conference paper, Modernist Studies Association Conference: Upheaval and Reconstruction. Toronto, Canada (19 October). Bornstein, George (2001), Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brooker, Peter and Andrew Thacker, eds (2009), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume I Britain 1880–1955. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brooker, Peter and Andrew Thacker, eds (2012), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II North America 1894–1960. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cheng, Anne Anlin (2013), Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cheng, Anne Anlin (2019), Ornamentalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cohen, Lara Langer, and Stein, Jordan Alexander, eds (2012), Early African American Print Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Danius, Sara (2002), The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dennison, Sally (1984), Alternative Literary Publishing: Five Modern Histories. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Donnell, Alison (2003), ‘Una Marson: Feminism, Anti-Colonialism and a Forgotten Fight for Freedom’, in West Indian Intellectuals in Britain, ed. Bill Schwarz. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 114–31. Gardner, Eric (2015), Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Glendenning, Victoria (2006), Leonard Woolf: A Biography. Cambridge: Free Press.

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Goble, Mark (2010), Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Goeser, Caroline (2007), Picturing the New Negro: Harlem Renaissance Print Culture and Modern Black Identity. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Green, Barbara (2017), Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life: Women and Modernity in British Culture. Houndmills: Palgrave. Hammill, Faye and Mark Hussey, eds (2016), Modernism’s Print Cultures. London: Bloomsbury. Hutchinson, George and John K. Young, eds (2013), Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race since 1850. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Jaillant, Lise, ed. (2019), Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Keyser, Catherine (2010), Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Larned, Emily (2016), ‘The Intimate Books of Anaïs Nin: Diarist as Letterpress Printer’, Openings: Studies in Book Art, 2: 1. Chicago: Temporary Services. Linett, Maren Tova (2016), Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. McGann, Jerome (1993), Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McTaggart, Ursula (2010), ‘“Opening the Door”: The Hogarth Press as Virginia Woolf’s Outsider Society’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 29: 1, pp. 63–81. Marcus, Laura (1996), ‘Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press’, in Modernist Writers and the Marketplace, ed. Ian Willison, Warwick Gould and Warren Chernaik. New York: Macmillan Press, pp. 124–50. Marek, Jayne E. (1995), Women Editing Modernism: ‘Little’ Magazines and Literary History. Lawrence: University Press of Kentucky. Moody, Joycelyn and Howard Ramsby II, eds (2015), ‘Special Issue: African American Print Cultures’, MELUS, 40: 3 (Fall). Nin, Anaïs (1969), The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume III 1939–1944, ed. Gunther Stuhlmann. New York, Sydney and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Nin, Anaïs (1998), ‘The Story of My Printing Press’, in The Publish It Yourself Handbook, ed. Bill Henderson. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, pp. 27–32. Porter, David H. (2000), ‘“We All Sit on the Edge of Stools and Crack Jokes”: Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press’, in Book Illustrated: Text, Image, and Culture, 1770–1930, ed. Catherine J. Golden. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, pp. 277–309. Rhein, Donna (1985), The Handprinted Books of Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1917–1932. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press. Rhys, Jean (1984), Jean Rhys Letters: 1931–1966. London: Andre Deutsch. Sanchez, Rebecca (2015), Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature. New York: New York University Press. Seshagiri, Urmila (2010), Race and the Modernist Imagination. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Snaith, Anna (2014), Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Southworth, Helen, ed. (2010), Leonard and Virginia Woolf: The Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Spires, Derrick (2019), The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Staveley, Alice (2009), ‘Marketing Virginia Woolf: Women, War, and Public Relations in “Three Guineas”’, Book History, 12, pp. 295–339.

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Staveley, Alice (2018), ‘Bibliographic Parturition in Orlando: Books, Babies, Freedom and Fame’, in Sentencing Orlando: Virginia Woolf and the Morphology of the Sentence, ed. Elsa Högberg and Amy Bromley. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 116–27. Toomer, Jean (1993), The Jean Toomer Reader: Selected Unpublished Writings, ed. Frederik L. Rusch. Oxford: Oxford University Press. U of Sussex, SxMs18 Monks House Papers Letters III: Virginia Woolf, Farrell-Lubbock labelled box 72, Folder Fry, Roger. West, M. Genevieve (2005), Zora Neale Hurston & American Literary Culture. Gainsville: University of Press of Florida. Willson, Elizabeth Gordon (2009), Woolf’s Head Publishing: The Highlights and New Lights of the Hogarth Press. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. Woolf, Leonard (1964), Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911–1918. London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Woolf, Virginia (1977a), The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume III, 1925–1930, ed. Anne Olivier Bell. London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Woolf, Virginia (1977b), The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume III: 1923–1928, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman. London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch. Young, John K. (2006), Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in TwentiethCentury African American Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Zackodnik, Teresa (2012), ‘Recirculation and Feminist Black Internationalism in Jessie Fauset’s “The Looking Glass” and Amy Jacques Garvey’s “Our Women and What They Think”’, Modernism/modernity, 19: 3 (September), pp. 437–59.

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4 Subways: Underground Networks Through Modernist Poetry and Prose Sunny Stalter-Pace

Entering the System

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cholars of modernism are accustomed to thinking about how technologies reorganise perception of time and space.1 Subway systems built from the midnineteenth century to the early twentieth transformed passengers’ perceptions of city space in modernist metropoles such as New York, London and Paris. Through their spatial organisation and the behaviours they encourage, modern subways model a new kind of movement that is at once physical and imaginative. Though these subways differ based on local geography, track layout and the like, they share a key structure: they connect distant points within city space without showing passengers the intervening sights and so ask the passengers to construct a kind of flexible, telescoping mental image of the city. The art and literature of the subway produced in this period reflects this modern experience formally and thematically through its unexpected shortcircuits and transfers between seemingly distant places and registers of language. In The Difficulties of Modernism, Leonard Diepeveen identifies the many ways that modernist writing has been characterised by its compression (2013: 57). From posters to poems, the cultural production of this period argues for the parallels between the spatial compression of the subway and the rhetorical and narrative compressions of modernist literature. Both ask us to navigate underground connections. Following Wiebe Bijker, I investigate in this chapter how the early twentiethcentury subway fits together as a ‘sociotechnical ensemble’ comprising mechanical, cultural, social and behavioural components (Bijker 1997: 274), an ensemble in which shared spatial and mechanical traits interact in complex ways with the particularities of urban space and history. Self-consciously experimental writing of the period, especially poetry, illustrates and explores the ways that the subway builds up a sense of place. In the sections that follow, I consider the ways that modern poets use the subway to represent new forms of mobility and perception, new attitudes toward the crowd and new citational practices, among other changes. Where conventional forms of wayfinding have failed, both subway riding and subway writing model new forms of orientation. To start with a definition of terms: in order to understand the subway’s relation to modernism, it is helpful to understand what is meant precisely by a subway. Some historians of technology and literature have considered the subway as one instance of underground city-space construed more broadly (Mumford 1961: 478–80; Williams

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1990: 73–81; Pike 2005: 20–68). For them, the subway operates in symbolic ways similar to those of the mine tunnel, the underground bunker, the sewer and the catacomb. These comparisons prove instructive for limning the importance of subterranean space to urban modernity. Other critics, particularly in the emerging field of mobility studies, discuss the theory and practice of subway mobility within the larger category of the railroad or the urban railway (Spalding 2014: 42–8). My understanding of the subway lies at the intersection of these two categories: an urban railway that mostly runs underground, across a networked system. I position myself at the intersection of these two conversations in order to gain a critical understanding of the subway as a technology that facilitated movement through the city while functioning frequently as a metonym for the city itself. For the modernist subject, accelerated mobility through subterranean space differed both from commuting on other modes of public transit and from making use of other underground spaces. The subway journey creates a distinct experience of liminal movement through a system whose logic cannot be immediately reconciled to that of the broader city. Subway systems connect distant points within city space through a complex network of routes, which distinguishes them from underground railway tunnels like the Channel Tunnel. Mobility studies scholars have discussed the ways that all ‘transport is itself an order-building intermediary’ (Divall and Revill 2005: 105); a subway network is additionally a complexity-building intermediary, increasing the number of potential pathways through the city. These pathways are not limitless: they are fixed by the possible entrances, exits and transfer points within the system. But they do create new ways of ordering city space, as well as new modes of representing it. This imaginative expansion may have even outpaced the expansion of infrastructure. The subway was a dominant setting and image in British mass culture, David Welsh notes, even in the pre-war era when the London Underground was ‘little more than a patchwork of self-contained lines’ (Welsh 2010: 8). The increase in possible pathways through the city and the potential for unexpected connections were reflected in a more experimental and free-associative style of subway writing. Acknowledging the influence of avant-garde movements such as Futurism upon British modernists, Welsh dubs this work ‘Tubism’ (2010: 8). ‘Tubist’ writers like Virginia Woolf use their writing to expand on the imagined potential changes in perception that were wrought by this new technology. From their earliest incarnation, subways de-emphasised visual perception. Subway networks could transport their passengers from one point to another without showing them the intervening sights. Art historian Lynda Nead describes the changes in London after ‘the world’s first underground railway’ opened in 1863: Now, instead of traversing space by following the logic of streets and other identifiable features, people could travel below the ground, on routes that obeyed the logic of their own lines and expediency. They could descend at one point in the city and emerge at another, with little sense of the spaces between, or the meaning of the time taken to make the journey. (Nead 2000: 36) A joke in a musical comedy fifty years later makes the same point: ‘Real Parisians know nothing of Paris. They ride underground in the Metro and never see anything’ (‘Broadway to Paris’ 1913: 24). Riders on a crowded bus or drivers passing through

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a tunnel may temporarily lose their ability to orient themselves visually within city space; subway passengers forgo the possibility altogether. The modern subway is embedded in city life and city literature through its role as an underground connector, a networked space offering transfer points between wildly disparate places and times. And it is this underground connection, I argue, that should be understood as a central shared feature of the modernist subway. I intend the concept of underground connection – both the literal transfer between subway lines and the more figurative mode of piecing together fragmented images of urban space – to be sufficiently capacious to allow comparison across modern subway systems. In his review essay ‘Towards a Cultural History of Underground Railways,’ Dhan Zunino Singh calls for a comparative history of the subway, one that acknowledges the structures shared across systems of subterranean urban transit as well as the local differences among them (Singh 2013: 112). For the purposes of this chapter, I consider the London Underground (first opened in 1863, electrified in 1890), the Paris Métro (1900) and the New York City Subway (1904). When relevant to the discussion, I also bring in the Berlin U-Bahn (1902), the Buenos Aires Subte, short for Subterráneo (1913), and the Moscow Metro (1935). Notably, their names emphasise either their urban location or their subterranean locale. These early systems were literally cut into the streets. Subway tunnels in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were constructed in similar ways: some were ground-level railways relocated below the grade of the street; shallow tunnels were dug from street level and covered over when complete, and some of the deepest ones were blasted through unforgiving strata of solid rock. Subways share cultural histories as well as modes of construction. David Pike points out that the subway was the first subterranean space used by all classes of city-dwellers in London, Paris, New York and Buenos Aires (2007: 56). The subway ride was a crossclass and cross-cultural badge of urban identity. But in his account of the Subte’s early history, Singh informs us that even the images shared across urban cultures – like the subway as an underworld or cemetery – resonate differently, depending on local factors. ‘The oddity of dwelling in the place of the dead was represented differently [in Buenos Aires] from the typical hellish representations of underground railways in other cities,’ he writes, noting that ‘Those representations were more related to the smoke-laden tunnel (London), the hot atmosphere (New York) or tragic accidents (Paris, after [the] 1903 Métro fire)’ (Singh 2014: 99). Even when metaphors were shared across urban centres, these shared metaphors arose from different experiences of subway space. While the Buenos Aires subway entrances may have been funereal in their design, the movement of passengers through the system was perceived as swift and efficient compared to their previous experience navigating the street-level traffic. As such local details about subway experiences exemplify, expanding the comparative scope of modernism gives scholars a much more nuanced understanding of technology’s use and meaning. Early in his anthropological analysis of the contemporary Paris Métro, Marc Augé notes parenthetically that subway stations ‘where several lines intersect’ are called correspondances in French and coincidenze – coincidences – in Italian (Augé 2002: 7). The following sections of this chapter serve as transfer points for thinking about subways across modernist cities and literary traditions, emphasising the correspondences and coincidences that hint at underlying connections. I discuss some of the ways that a focus on the comparative experience of underground connection modifies current

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understanding of the modern subway, especially as the rider’s experience is articulated through modernist writing. To find two trains going different directions is a coincidence of different possible pathways in the same space. It also opens up subway narratives by bringing together different people within them. Points of connection and crossing evoke the magnitude of the system for riders unable to perceive it in its totality.

Segmentation The railway and the subway draw distant locations together, but they do so in ways that have different perceptual consequences for their riders. The railroad was perceived in the early nineteenth century as a technology that compressed – and even ‘annihilated’ – space and time (Schivelbusch 1987). Time and space were seen as compressed when travelling at the speed allowed by the railroad: a railway journey could be made faster than one by carriage, which shortened the time spent in transit and thus the perceived distance between places. Subway commutes also compressed space within the city, bringing distant neighbourhoods into far closer proximity with one another. But these two forms of rail travel differ dramatically in terms of their organisation of the intervening landscape. The railway produced what Schivelbusch terms ‘panoramic perception’, where the outside world seen through glass windows lost its dimension of depth and instead seemed more like an unrolling landscape of images to be consumed (1987: 60–4). In contrast, the images seen outside the subway window lack this continuity. Instead, the visible subway stations are punctuated by spaces of blankness, with occasional glimpses of passing trains or other elements of the infrastructure. Indeed, Niamh Sweeney notes that the Paris Métro creates an ‘anti-panoramic’ vision of Paris, one that operates in striking contrast to the continuity of the city as seen from the Eiffel Tower (2011: 36). The smooth unfurling of the landscape by train becomes segmented underground – a slideshow, not a film. Even reading on the train changes when transferred to the subway. The subway reader is constantly aware of time passing on their commute, made visible by the successive names of subway stations and waves of fellow commuters entering and exiting the train. Schivelbusch understands the practice of reading on the train as creating an interior landscape that unfurls, uninterrupted, in parallel to the panoramic exterior landscape (1987: 65). When writing about subway reading, however, most essays emphasise the constant interruption of stops and starts, as well as the physical contact made by other passengers. A 1929 New York Times article discusses the necessary attributes that a subway commuter must have in order to read in transit. These include ‘physical agility at times approaching acrobatics’, along with patience, grit and an even temper (‘Those Who Read in the Subway’ 1929: SM9). Any semblance of placid absorption is hard won. Subways shape the perception of the modern city in myriad ways. One of the most identifiable changes that can be seen across different urban centres is the newly salient feeling of segmentation that subway systems introduce within the mental maps of residents. Russian Symbolist Andrei Bely says in his memoirs, ‘everyone lives in one of several Parises, and you could spend your life in the space that separates them, flying underground from quartier to quartier in the Métro’ (qtd in Fabre 2002: 40). Paris becomes fragmented into smaller and smaller versions of itself, which the subway both separates and connects. Urban planner Kevin Lynch points to this modern

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experience of urban perception in his discussion of the ways that the Boston subway shapes residents’ understanding of the city. ‘The subway stations, strung along their invisible path systems,’ Lynch writes, ‘are strategic junction nodes’ (1960: 74). Subway stations provide a concentrated burst of information – possible entrances and exits, additional information in the form of station names and advertisements – which shuts off when the doors close and the train pulls away. Where the ‘panoramic perception’ made possible by the railway gives travellers a consistent if flattened sense of the landscape between stations, the segmented perception of the subway emphasises the disconnected quality of stations. This technological shift manifests itself stylistically in the fragmentation present in modern poetry, where the subway plays an important role as the setting. Here we might think of the first version of ‘In a Station of the Metro’, formatted as it appeared in the April 1913 issue Poetry: The apparition  of these faces  in the crowd : Petals  on a wet, black  bough . (Pound 1913: 12) The parallelism between the first line and the second – faces in a crowd are like petals on a bough – is undercut by the unconventional spacing of words. Each phrase operates as a stand-alone perceptual unit; even the punctuation marks stand apart. In its first version, the poem embodies the segmented perception of its location. The poem suggests how the discreteness of perception in the subway becomes mirrored and extended by the segmented perceptions of its passengers. Even when they are observing aesthetically, subway passengers see the world in ways shaped by their movement through underground space. Emphasis on the discreteness of individual perceptions pervades the poetry of the 1910s. It is one component of what Tim Conley calls ‘a language born of the common experience of mass transit’ which ‘bespeak[s] an international community’ (2014: 98). Critics discussing the subway as a setting in modern poetry have paid close attention to Richard Aldington’s ‘In the Tube’, which was included in the ‘Imagist Number’ of little magazine The Egoist (see, for example, Morrisson 2001: 96–9; Thacker 2003: 193; Welsh 2010: 164). As the speaker scans his surroundings, the second stanza moves pitilessly through a series of segmented elements of the train’s interior: A row of advertisements, A row of windows, Set in brown woodwork pitted with brass nails A row of hard faces, Immobile, In the swaying train, Rush across the flickering background of fluted dingy tunnel; A row of eyes, Eyes of greed, of pitiful blankness, of plethoric complacency, Immobile, Gaze, stare at one point, At my eyes. (Aldington 1915: 74)

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The eyes all stare at the same point, and they render the same judgement. Though the eyes of the passengers might reveal different emotional states, they are nevertheless ‘immobile’, fixed in their evaluative attitudes. This renders them even less flexible than the train’s windows, which at least reveal the ‘flickering background’ of the exterior tunnels. We might anticipate that the speaker’s ‘immediate antipathy’ toward the crowd would set him apart, an individual among the masses. But the speaker recognises his fellow passengers’ hostility mirroring his own: ‘I surprise the same thought/ In the brasslike eyes://What right have you to live?’ (1915: 74). His sense of separation from the crowd is what enables him to identify with the passengers, who, like him, feel defensive and alone together. Reading across cultural hierarchies, we can find this common language of isolation put toward different ends. In mass-circulation magazines published around the same time, American middlebrow poets also segmented the subway crowd, though more often into urban types inspired by local colour fiction and newspaper sketches (Zurier 2006: 100). Joyce Kilmer, for instance, describes ‘Tired clerks, pale girls, street cleaners, business men,/Boys, priests and harlots, drunkards, students, thieves’ (1910: 467). His sonnet looks away from the subway crowd and sees in the flickers of light and dark outside the carriage a hint of the overall structure through which they are moving, which, for this observant Catholic author, was that of God’s goodness and love. Kilmer was one of many poets at the time who wrote subway verse to explore the sense of unity hinted at through the flashes of insight (Stalter-Pace 2013: 64–5). The segmented crowd does not always suggest shared alienation; it often evokes a sense of the sublime.

Station Names By moving passengers beneath the landscape, the subway renders large sections of the city invisible. Abstract knowledge of the city substitutes for its more direct equivalent. Critics have discussed the importance of abstraction in Harry Beck’s 1931 Underground map (Pike 2005: 21; Schwetman 2014: 90). Through its strategies of visual simplification and distortion, which Beck likened to looking at the city through a convex lens, this map emphasises the self-contained logic of the system (Hadlaw 2003: 32). Subway movement no longer needed to be imagined in a way that maintained a mimetic correspondence with the above-ground geography of London. The commute took place through an underground space that was not parallel to the reality of the surface city, but rather analogous to it. Modernist writers describe the ways that station names function in this set-apart landscape, standing in metonymically for the surrounding neighbourhood that the subway passenger might otherwise never see. One passage in Jacob’s Room begins by describing an accountant working in the City, then moves on to commuters donning their overcoats and leaving at the end of their working day (Woolf 1922: 109). The narration meditates on the stations that these commuters encounter while going home: ‘Marble Arch – Shepherd’s Bush’ – to the majority the Arch and the Bush are eternally white letters upon a blue ground. Only at one point – it may be Acton, Holloway, Kensal Rise, Caledonian Road – does the name mean shops where you buy things, and houses, in one of which, down to the right, where the pollard trees

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grow out of the paving stones, there is a square curtained window, and a bedroom. (1922: 109–10) Taken together, these station names map a city whose everyday reality is experienced unequally, one that is often glimpsed through the subway commute alone. Marble Arch and Shepherd’s Bush are part of the London Underground’s Central line, and so would be encountered regularly on the journey between the west London suburbs and a workplace in central London. While Acton can be found near the western end of the Central line, the other stations mentioned are in different boroughs: Holloway and Caledonian Road in North London, and Kensal Rise in the Northwest. Though the locales may differ, residents of each neighbourhood have similarly detailed knowledge of their starting- and ending-points, supplemented by lower-definition information of the neighbourhoods between home and work. Knowledge of the city is a relative, lived experience whose myriad permutations cannot be represented on a transit map.2 Since they are not tied to the street-level grid, subway stations take on an outsized importance in cognitive maps of the underground city. In his Arcades Project section on ‘Ancient Paris, Catacombs, Demolitions, the Decline of Paris’, Walter Benjamin describes the ways that Parisian station names come to stand on their own: at dusk glowing red lights point the way into an underworld of names, Combat, Elysée, Georges V, Etienne Marcel, Solférino, Invalides, Vaugirard – they have all thrown off the humiliating fetters of street or square [. . .] Here, underground, nothing more of the collision, the intersection of names – that which aboveground forms the linguistic network of the city. Here each name dwells alone. (2002: 84) These names become mythic, part of an ‘underworld of names’ because they detach themselves from the mapped, surface-level city. Station names operate as self-referential units. This existence promises a kind of separation of the urban subject from the crowd, across a threshold and into a quasi-mythical space of self-determination. As Benjamin evocatively suggests, subway station names operate as sites of linguistic and geographic condensation. Hope Mirrlees begins her 1919 poem Paris with the utterance ‘I want a holophrase’ – that is, a single word that young children can use to stand in for a more complex request (Mirrlees 1919: 3). In this disjointed and imagistic poem, subway station names show how fragmentary and evocative language pervades the life of the city dweller. We might understand the names of subway stops along the Nord–Sud line as poetic holophrasis, both standing in for the subway journey and marking the speaker’s trajectory through the city. The poem moves from ‘RUE DU BAC’ to ‘SOLFERINO’ to ‘CHAMBRE DES DEPUTES’ and finally, after a slow trip under the Seine, to ‘CONCORDE’ (Mirrlees 1919: 3). Critics discussing the poem have emphasised the historical and mythological references in the subway station names and how they operate in dialogue with other references in the poem (Pryor 2019: 44; Briggs 2005: 33). ‘Rue du Bac’, for example, refers to a sixteenth-century ferry at the end of that street, Solférino to a nineteenth-century battle. Attending to these proper names thus strengthens and gives additional specificity to Megan Beech’s reading of Paris, where she argues that the poem’s typography and spacing ‘emulates and creates the multi-sensory nature of urban experience and perception’ (Beech 2018: 72). A characteristic experience of the Métro is to understand the names of subway stations

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as simultaneously densely referential and completely everyday (Augé 2002: 19–23). Meditating on the histories of station names as one journeys through the subway system epitomises the experience of underground connection, where even a straightforward commute can move through stations whose referents branch wildly through space and time. Subway rides, then, become literal enactments of the meaning-making that takes place while reading a densely allusive modernist text.

Advertisements Discussions of the visual character of subways in the early twentieth century have frequently concentrated on the iconic design of infrastructural elements. Along with Harry Beck’s Tube map, one might think of Hector Guimard’s Art Nouveau Métro entrances, for instance, or the vivid posters commissioned by Frank Pick (Bobrick 1994: 154–5; Saler 1999: 100–1). More prevalent across cities at the time was the everyday advertisement. Ads proliferated in the modern city, and by the turn of the twentieth century they had become bolder in appearance and placement (Zurier 2006: 56–7). Designers of the New York City Subway thought that the visual landscape of the platform would be reserved for station names and maps alone, but that belief was torn to shreds when subway builder August Belmont had holes drilled in station walls for advertising posters the day after the subway opened to the public (Brooks 1997: 69). Some systems saw even more visual clutter: David Welsh describes early photos of London subway stations where ads covered platform walls and parts of the tracks (2010: 62). Lynne Kirby understands the subway station in American silent film as ‘a condensed version of the commercial chaos of city streets and marketplaces’ (Kirby 1997: 135). In both cases, the chaos is more condensed because it is underground, not mitigated by the natural world or the unembellished parts of the built environment that might be marked ‘Post No Bills’. The unavoidable prominence of advertisements as part of the underground landscape makes them an important element in the perception of urban life, one that is explored in much modern writing. Sometimes advertisements appear in modernist literature as icons – a brand name, the flash of an image – while in other cases commercial slogans added to the jargon of the city. But in every case, advertising language is recognisably different from other forms of speech. Mirrlees’s Paris creates a subway ride where brand names stand shoulder to shoulder with the names of subway stations: RUE DU BAC (DUBONNET) SOLFERINO (DUBONNET) CHAMBRES DES DEPUTES Brekekekek coax coax we are passing under the Seine DUBONNET (Mirrlees 1919:3) It is a rare description of the Métro that fails to mention Dubonnet, an aperitif widely advertised in early twentieth-century France. Walter Benjamin, for instance, calls the brand name one of the ‘guardians of the threshold’ in his discussion of the Métro as underworld (2002: 84). Notably, the company’s advertising strategy included posting placards in the Métro tunnels so they would flicker into view between stations (Ungar

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2018: 52). I suspect that the parenthetical repetitions of Dubonnet in Mirrlees’s poem are meant to mimic that specific placement. At the same time, brand names also seem to function in Paris as ghostly echoes of station names, suggesting the ways that commuting and consumption are intertwined. Rather than focusing on the iconic, visual elements of advertising, as the Imagists did, artists and writers influenced by Dadaism were inclined to use the language of advertisements and public service announcements as a part of their poetry. This citational strategy creates a verbal collage, one where the private language of lyric and the public language of modernity clash. In his ‘Subway Poem’, Kurt Schwitters juxtaposes the dazzling visual effect of the bright subway station and the dark tunnels with the snatches of public speech read by passengers: ‘(super shoeshines)’; ‘(physician tested)’; and the final line, ‘(In case of crowds step to the center aisle)’ (Schwitters 1920: 156). These slogans and prompts function in a similar way to the bus tickets and newspaper headlines pasted into Schwitters’s visual art collages; they are set apart as specimens of everyday life in the modern city. Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven wrote a similarly bricolaged poem, ‘Subjoyride’. The poem, which ‘takes the reader on an underworld journey past advertisement slogans along New York City’s subway tunnels’ (Gammel 2003: 278), fragments the advertising slogans of the subway and reconstitutes them into a comic pastiche (Conley 2014: 97). It also demonstrates the wit necessary to arrange that onrush of information into a semi-coherent message: Dear Mary – the mint with The hole – oh lifebuoy! Adheres well – delights Your taste – continuous Germicidal action. (Von Freytag-Loringhoven 1920/2: 411) These short, enjambed lines with dashes as caesurae emphasise the segmentation and discreteness of subway perception twice over. The poem moves associatively from Lifesavers candies to Lifebuoy soap, and then to the slogan of a product that combines properties of the two, Formamint throat tablets, whose ‘continuous germicidal action’ came from formaldehyde. By juxtaposing advertisements, the poem reveals their shared traits and their common underlying absurdity. Much of the poem documents modern fears about health and hygiene (Goody 2019: 70). It ends, however, by asking readers to consider the subway as an aesthetic space, and does so in an imperative mood. ‘Wake up your passengers –’, enjoins a line almost midway through the final stanza (1920/2: 413): Don’t envy Aunt Jemima’s Self raising Cracker Jack Laxative knitted chemise With that chocolaty Taste – use Pickles in Pattern Follow Green Lions. (Von Freytag-Loringhoven 1920/2: 413)

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To recklessly enjoy a ride on the subway, the poem imagines, one must take up new habits and ways of seeing. Instead of the jealous attitude that might make a passenger responsive to these sales pitches, the poem suggests a defamiliarising frame of mind. The pickles in the penultimate line may be Heinz – ‘Pickles in Patterns’ was a slogan of theirs in the early 1920s – but by avoiding the brand name and emphasising their patterning, the poem moves into the realm of design.3 Similarly, Green Lion may be a tobacco company, but it is also an alchemical symbol. ‘Subjoyride’ argues that the subway does not necessarily have to function as a technology of capitalism. It is a space that can be reimagined and transformed.

Is a Subway Local or Global? Geographical boundaries are among the features reimagined – and occasionally reinforced – by advertising. In subway poetry, advertisements often seem to articulate the local and national identity being traced by the journey: to return to the ‘Subjoyride’, few brands represent the United States as forcefully as Aunt Jemima and Cracker Jack. But even in the early twentieth century, brands were transnational presences. The chubby baby that advertised the American brand Cadum Soap, for example, was ‘the dominant advertising character’ in France circa 1919 (‘Is France the Advertising Man’s Promised Land?’ 1919: 130). Early twentieth-century advertisers bridged national borders through marketing as well as supply chains, creating a modern space that disrupted the distinction between otherwise distant locales. On one of his visits to France, Russian Symbolist writer Andrei Bely re-encountered unexpected elements of home: ‘Dubonnet was my first encounter in Paris; my relative Alexandre Benois my first encounter with a person. This caused sudden geographical confusion: is this Paris or Petersburg?’ (qtd in Fabre 2002: 40). The subway system serves as a similar space of disorientation. The underground connections and crossovers particular to subway systems make them particularly apt spaces for modernist writers to engage in imaginative, border-crossing transfers. Brand names encroach upon everyday routines throughout modernist literature: we can think of the plane skywriting ‘Glaxo’ or ‘Kreemo’ during Clarissa’s walk in Mrs Dalloway as one characteristic example. But the predominance of brand names in subway systems reveals something about the way that technological networks function in space as well. For Bely, brand names, like encounters with relatives, are signs of continuity between modernist cities rather than disruption between them. In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour asks if the railway should be understood as a local or global network and then shows how it works at both scales: It is local at all points, since you always find sleepers and railroad workers, and you have stations and automatic ticket machines scattered along the way. Yet it is global, since it takes you from Madrid to Berlin or from Brest to Vladivostok. (Latour 2012: 117) Modern subway systems, similarly, are local systems suffused with global meaning at levels both systemic and individual. The local reality of the subway system is thus constituted through the global.

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Histories of modern subways can sometimes reveal the tension between national and international forces in the making of technological systems. Andrew Jenks’s history of the Moscow Metro’s construction discusses how newspapers announced ‘The Entire Country Built the Metro’, detailing the regions that had provided different raw materials for its construction (2000: 703). While these components were celebrated, Soviet engineers ‘scrutinized the Berlin subway’; Jenks notes that the system’s escalators ‘bore a remarkable resemblance’ to those in the London Tube stations (2000: 704). Even when subways were built as grand, unifying nationalistic projects, they contained within them the traces of other cities and other systems. While subway design might suppress the traces of other cities’ engineering, it often highlights the extractive relationship between the metropole and the colony. Mobility studies scholars discuss how transportation systems define a culture’s sense of spatial scale (Divall and Revill 2005: 106). Modern subway posters compress and distort the scale of colonialism by eliding distances and emphasising the local accessibility of products from the colonies. British painter Ernest Michael Dinkel’s poster from 1933, for example, invites passengers to ‘Visit the Empire by London’s Underground’. At the centre of the poster, a partial world map picks out British colonial holdings in red. The map is ringed by illustrations that represent ‘The Wealth, Romance, and Beauty of the Empire’; beneath them is an image of a subway carriage and five roundels marking stations where this ‘romance and beauty’ can be experienced within London city limits. These forces can be represented through commercial posters as well as nationalistic ones. To return to the beginning of Hope Mirrlees’s poem Paris is to plunge into a stream of brand names with colonialist associations: I want a holophrase NORD-SUD ZIG-ZAG LION NOIR CACAO BLOOKER Black-figured vases in Etruscan tombs. (Mirrlees 1919: 3) The poem’s third line, ‘ZIG-ZAG’, refers to a brand of rolling papers represented by the Zouave soldier associated with imperialism in North Africa (Briggs 2005: 33). Although it is unclear if she is referencing the specific image, ‘Cacao Blooker’ (Mirrlees 1919: 3) was also represented in at least one poster campaign of that era by a Ludwig Hohlwein image of a bare-chested African man with some cacao pods. These brand names contain within them a condensed way of seeing the world, one that implicitly embraces colonial conscription in North Africa and resource extraction in West Africa. By comparing the posters to ancient artefacts that might also be found underground, Mirrlees’s poem denaturalises their ideological content. Subway travellers, too, can represent the forces of empire, diaspora and travel central to the identities of modern cities. Marc Augé imagines the ‘irruption of global history in our daily rides’ when he notes contemporary subway passengers in Paris going to ethnic markets or tourist sites (2002: 14). In poetry of the 1920s, the subway often served as a liminal space, one that evoked the speaker’s home as much as it did the alienated modern city. Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky imagines a ‘revolt of

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the rails’ where the Métro would defect from Paris and join him (and the Eiffel Tower) in a more egalitarian Moscow (1923: 109–10). In the same period, Russian exiles in Paris formed their own transnational literary community centred around the neighbourhood of Montparnasse (Rubins 2015). Artists located in both Moscow and Paris articulated the underground linkages that they saw, or hoped to see, between these two centres of culture. New York subway poetry in the same period appealed to immigrant writers, perhaps because the in-between space it depicted could connect to diverse backgrounds and experiences. The subway car was a standard setting in Yiddish-language poetry written about the American Jewish experience of city life (Levinson 2012: 74). Poets Moyshe-Leyb Halpern and Yehoash both use the image of swaying on the subway car to connect the image of a commuter in transit to that of a faithful Jew in the midst of a prayer (Levinson 2012: 79; Yehoash 1919: 180). In his poem ‘Subway Wind’, Claude McKay uses the breeze from a lowered window to move imaginatively between a subway carriage in New York City and the West Indian home from which many people (McKay included) have emigrated (Posmentier 2017: 38). Where the subway of empire brings the fruits of the colonies to the urban centre in order to sell them, the diasporic subway offers a syncretic alternative where traditions and unresolved histories fuse with the habits of technological modernity.

Terminus The sense of the modern subway system that coalesced in the early twentieth century transformed into a different kind of socio-technical ensemble in the middle decades of the century. Once Londoners sheltered in Tube stations to avoid bombings during the Blitz, it was difficult to imagine the Underground as a ‘space of abstract circulation – the archetypal non-place’ (Ashford 2013: 115). With the post-war dominance of the automobile in the US, the panoramic perception felt while travelling by train returned, this time experienced individually rather than collectively. New patterns of migration in the post-war era had a major influence on the subway’s makeup and its reception as well (Anyinefa 2003; Brooks 1997; McLeod 2006). While the subway may have been the first subterranean space used by rich and poor alike, it came to be increasingly associated with the working classes and with minoritised racial groups. The subway remains a public space, but one that is shared unevenly. The modern subway nevertheless echoes in contemporary journeys. Passengers today still move through abstracted landscapes that are informed by global and local pressures. And contemporary poetry continues to reckon with modern subway poetry and the ways it mapped underground connections.4 Poet Jacques Jouet of the Oulipo group has transformed the segmentation of the subway commute into a literary constraint called the ‘Metro-Poem’, which is meant to be composed and written on the subway ride. The first stanza of ‘Metro Poems’, separately titled ‘What is a metro poem?’, defines the rules one must follow to write it: compose a line between the first station and the second, write it down when stopped at the second station, and so on; if you transfer to a new Underground line within the system, you may begin a new stanza. ‘The poem’s last line’, Jouet writes, ‘is written down on the platform of the last station’ (Jouet and Monk 2001: 4). The later, numbered stanzas of ‘Metro Poems’ are just as time- and place-bound as those of early twentieth-century subway poets. But

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Jouet begins with a structure that generates meaning across different subway systems, helping poets to think as they move through city space. I hope this essay serves the same function to scholars of modern technologies. Today’s subways may cover the same territory, but riders and writers continue to develop new maps.

Notes   1. One of the foundational works in this area is Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (1983). More recent critical engagements with this technological framework include Enda Duffy’s The Speed Handbook (2009) and the collection Moving Modernisms (2016), edited by David Bradshaw, Laura Marcus and Rebecca Roach.   2. British artist Helen Scalway explored the private mappings of contemporary London subway space with her project ‘Travelling Blind’, where she asked commuters to draw a map of their London Underground. Some tried to replicate the official Tube diagram; others mapped their usual route with more or less success. See Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘The Elsewhere of the London Underground’, in Electronic Elsewheres: Media, Technology, and the Experience of Social Space (2010).   3. I have found reference to Heinz advertisements with the slogan ‘Pickles in Patterns’ only in publications from 1923 or later. Perhaps these ads were placed in subway stations before they appeared in print magazines.   4. The dominance of male authors in this tradition, for instance, shaped the narrative and citational form of Alice Notley’s book-length poem from 1996, The Descent of Alette. See Julia Bloch, ‘Alice Notley’s Descent’ (2012).

Works Cited Aldington, Richard (1915), ‘In the Tube’, The Egoist, 1 May, p. 74. Anyinefa, Koffi (2003), ‘Le Métro parisien: figure de l’exotisme postcolonial’, French Forum, 28: 2, pp. 77–98. Ashford, David (2013), London Underground: A Cultural Geography. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Augé, Marc (2002), In the Metro, trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Beech, Megan (2018), ‘Obscure, Indecent and Brilliant’, in Virginia Woolf and the World of Books, ed. Nicola Wilson and Claire Battershill. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 70–5. Benjamin, Walter (2002), The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Bijker, Wiebe E. (1997), Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bloch, Julia (2012), ‘Alice Notley’s Descent: Modernist Genealogies and Gendered Literary Inheritance’, Journal of Modern Literature, 35: 3, pp. 1–24. Bobrick, Benson (1994), Labyrinths of Iron: Subways in History, Myth, Art, Technology, and War. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Bradshaw, David, Laura Marcus and Rebecca Roach, eds (2016), Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Briggs, Julia (2005), ‘“Printing Hope”: Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees, and the Iconic Imagery of Paris’, in Woolf in the Real World, ed. Karen V. Kukil. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, pp. 31–6. ‘Broadway to Paris’ script (1913), Ole Olsen Collection, Ned Wayburn material Box 1, Folder 58, University of Southern California Cinematic Arts Library.

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Brooks, Michael W. (1997), Subway City: Riding the Trains, Reading New York. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Brunsdon, Charlotte (2010), ‘The Elsewhere of the London Underground’, in Electronic Elsewheres: Media, Technology, and the Experience of Social Space, ed. and intro. Chris Berry, Soyoung Kim and Lynn Spigel. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 197–233. Conley, Tim (2014), ‘City Transit Gloria: Mass Movements and Metropolitan Poetics’, Journal of Modern Literature, 37: 4, pp. 91–108. Diepeveen, Leonard (2013), The Difficulties of Modernism. New York: Routledge. Dinkel, Ernest Michael (1933), Poster; Visit the Empire, by Ernest Michael Dinkel, 1933, Poster. Acton Depot, London Transport Museum, (last accessed 19 January 2022). Divall, Colin and George Revill (2005), ‘Cultures of Transport’, Journal of Transport History, 26: 1, pp. 99–111. Duffy, Enda (2009), The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fabre, Gladys (2002), ‘Paris: The Arts and the “Internationale de l’esprit”’, in Paris: Capital of the Arts, 1900–1968, ed. Sarah Wilson and Eric De Chassey. London: Royal Academy of Arts, pp. 40–53. Freytag-Loringhoven, Elsa Von (2012 [1920/2]), ‘Subjoyride’, in Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity, ed. Jed Rasula and Tim Conley. Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, pp. 411–13. Gammel, Irene (2003), Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity – A Cultural Biography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Goody, Alex (2019), Modernist Poetry, Gender and Leisure Technologies: Machine Amusements. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hadlaw, Janin (2003), ‘The London Underground Map: Imagining Modern Time and Space’, Design Issues, 19: 1, pp. 25–35. ‘Is France the Advertising Man’s Promised Land?’ (1919), Printer’s Ink, 29 May. Jenks, Andrew L. (2000), ‘A Metro on the Mount: The Underground as a Church of Soviet Civilization’, Technology and Culture, 41: 4 (1 October), pp. 697–724. Jouet, Jacques and Ian Monk (2001), ‘Metro Poems’, AA Files, 45/6, pp. 4–14. Kern, Stephen (1983), The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kilmer, Joyce (1910), ‘The Subway (96th Street to 137th Street)’, The Independent, 1 September. Kirby, Lynne (1997), Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Latour, Bruno (2012), We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Levinson, Julian (2012), ‘On Some Motifs in Moyshe-Leyb Halpern: A Benjaminian Meditation on Yiddish Modernism’, Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, 32: 1, pp. 63–88. Lynch, Kevin (1960), The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McLeod, John (2006), ‘Orphia in the Underground: Postcolonial London Transport’, in Transport(s) in the British Empire and the Commonwealth/Transport(s) dans l’empire britannique et le Commonwealth, ed. Michèle Lurdos and Judith Misrahi-Barak. Montpellier, France: Université Paul Valéry, pp. 389–405. Mayakovsky, Vladimir (2012 [1923]), ‘Paris (Chatting with the Eiffel Tower)’, in Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity, ed. Jed Rasula and Tim Conley. Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, pp. 108–11. Mirrlees, Hope (1919). Paris: A Poem, Richmond. London: Hogarth Press. Morrisson, Mark S. (2001), The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

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Mumford, Lewis (1961), The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Nead, Lynda (2000), Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-Century London. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pike, David Lawrence (2005), Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pike, David Lawrence (2007), Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Posmentier, Sonya (2017), Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pound, Ezra (1913), ‘In a Station of the Metro’, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 2: 1, p. 12. Pryor, Sean (2019), ‘A Poetics of Occasion in Hope Mirrlees’s Paris’, Critical Quarterly, 61: 1, pp. 37–53. Rubins, Maria (2015), Russian Montparnasse: Transnational Writing in Interwar Paris, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Saler, Michael T. (1999), The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground. New York: Oxford University Press. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang (1987), The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schwetman, John D. (2014), ‘Harry Beck’s London Underground Map: A Convex Lens for the Global City’, Transfers, 4: 2 (1 June), pp. 86–103. Schwitters, Kurt (2012 [1920]), ‘Subway Poem’, in Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity, ed. Jed Rasula and Tim Conley, Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, p. 156. Singh, Dhan Zunino (2013), ‘Towards a Cultural History of Underground Railways’, Mobility in History, 4: 1, pp. 106–12. Singh, Dhan Zunino (2014), ‘Meaningful Mobilities: The Experience of Underground Travel in the Buenos Aires Subte, 1913–1944’, The Journal of Transport History, 35: 1, pp. 97–113. Spalding, Steven D. (2014), ‘Rail Networks, Mobility, and the Cultures of Cities: Introduction to the Special Section’, Transfers, 4: 2, pp. 42–8. Stalter-Pace, Sunny (2013), Underground Movements: Modern Culture on the New York City Subway. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Sweeney, Niamh (2011), ‘Tour Eiffel/Paris Metro: Symbolic Associations and the Question of Scale in Representations of Simultaneity’, Irish Journal of French Studies, 11, pp. 21–45. Thacker, Andrew (2003), Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ‘Those Who Read in the Subway’ (1929), New York Times, 30 June, SM9. Ungar, Steven (2018), Critical Mass: Social Documentary in France from the Silent Era to the New Wave. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Welsh, David (2010), Underground Writing: The London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Williams, Rosalind (2008 [1990]), Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Woolf, Virginia (1971 [1922]), Jacob’s Room. London: Hogarth Press. Yehoash (1919), ‘Subway’, in Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity, ed. Jed Rasula and Tim Conley. Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, p. 180. Zurier, Rebecca (2006), Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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5 Automobiles: The Modernist Gaze and Speed’s Visual Limit-field Enda Duffy

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T

he rupture of metal and safety glass and the deliberate destruction of deliberately engineered artefacts, had left me lightheaded’ (Ballard 1985: 125). In literature, the swirling buildup of the first phase of appalled fascination at what the automobile had wrought converged on one notorious text, J. G. Ballard’s Crash. The automobile’s promise of the thrilling experience of unprecedented personal speed, and the pushing of its driver’s sensations to their limits, had made it a new kind of commodity: one which not only granted the usual pleasures of consumerism and status, but demanded new, extreme, use of one’s senses, and which induced, in that very use, pleasurable stress. For Ballard, at the end of this era, it was only at the moment of the crash that the full implications of this new model of what it meant to be human in interaction with technology could be mapped in fascinated horror. Before him, many artists had experimented with elucidating the joys of car speeds: from Marinetti’s pro-car oratorio in the 1909 ‘Futurist Manifesto’ to the car chases of the first Hollywood films and the Jaguar spills of James Bond; the admiration for drivers and driving in Proust’s La Recherche and the excitements of driving joyously delineated in Woolf’s Orlando; the windscreen painting of Manet and the speeding-car photos of Jacques-Henri Lartigue. They had all been willing to celebrate the car as commodity, but with an undercurrent of concern about what is unleashed in the driver-subject. The experimental strategies of the various modernisms were excellent for plumbing the limits and the possible new intensities – of attentiveness, endurance, adrenaline rush and stress – that this new technology incited in its users. Delineating these stresses in turn drove various modernisms to their own limits of representation. This chapter will first consider the two poles of consumer celebration and terror which greeted the arrival of the automobile; we will then examine representations of the first sense stressed by the experience of driving at speed, that of sight. Seeing at speed became a modernist topic and a spur to new kinds of modernist representations and genres, which in turn prompted engineers to develop still newer technologies of seeing. Capturing the speed gaze became the task of the moving image; it also fostered a telegraphic, cinematic turn in literature and art.

The Automobile as Limit Commodity In middlebrow fiction after 1900, the automobile, first produced in its modern form around 1896, appeared as the novel commodity, a further enhancement to established hierarchies of gender and class. Published at the very end of the long ‘era of the horse’,

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the historical stage when the speed of the fastest pack animal had set the limit to the land speed of humans and goods (the train, before the motorcar, had presaged its end), books such as E. Œ Somerville and Martin Ross’s Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.1 feature the automobile as a new wonder and rich man’s toy. Like other comedies of manners of the era, Somerville and Ross’s writing can be read as a farewell salute to horse lore, and to the ancient idea that speed was the outcome of a well-arranged conjunction of human and animal life. Published between 1899 and 1915, these stories are awash in horse-riding, judging and racing, at a time when the speed of a galloping horse was considered (except for the train) the fastest land speed. The fin de siècle saw a last hurrah of these cults of horse speeds. Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse, by Anna Sewell, was published in 1877; the Ascot Gold Cup (won by Throwaway in 1904) is cited in Ulysses (1922); and the world of grooms, jockeys and betting is the setting of George Moore’s naturalist masterpiece Esther Waters (1894). The key 1878 commission of the pioneering photographer of movement Eadweard Muybridge showed Leland Stanford’s galloping horse. A quarter-century after Muybridge united horse speed, technology and the possibilities of seeing, in the rural lanes of the Irish R.M. stories the motorcar makes its daunting, speedful appearance. It would be all too easy to read the car in these ‘sketches’ as a mere Edwardian accoutrement, an ornament on a par with tennis whites, motor-yachts, elaborate hats and bicycles – all of which also feature. The guileless Major Yeates is never more selfsatisfied as when he dispenses with his stableboy–coachman, to take the wheel of his new automobile himself. However, once the automobile, half-way through the series, insinuates itself into almost every tale, the new machine’s power to cover large distances at speed impinges upon and alters the outcome of almost every story. The car, stolen by the children of a nouveau-riche family, symbolically crashes into their shrubbery; faster than galloping hunt horses, it carries Lady Knox triumphantly to the scene of an eviction she prevents;2 a car allows Major Yeates’s guest to find the fox before the hunting party. The train, with its ‘Bradshaw’ timetables (Somerville and Ross 1984: 336), still tethers remote Shreelane to the British Empire, but in one of the best set-pieces the train is ridiculed for its slowness, and it is the Major’s vast new automobile, symbol of the embrace of modernity, the masculine mastery of mechanics, upper-class family values, even of assured prosperity, that becomes the plot-changer (Somerville and Ross 1984: 273–86), and the necessary catalyst for many of the chronicled adventures. The automobile, launched upon the Western upper-class scene, was the jewel in the crown of the early twentieth-century consumer universe. At the height of this first long stage of consumerism in the West, it was to be expected that the automobile, as the most glamourous commodity of all, would be the one that embodied the most profound effect. Comedies of Edwardian manners such as Somerville and Ross’s Irish R.M. and even such innocent-seeming works as Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), in which Toad’s car mania, and its ‘spills’ and ‘speed thrills’, are described in relishing detail, therefore function as advertising for the new invention. They also, however, imply a mass enthusiasm for this novel object, an enthusiasm awakened because here was not simply another inert consumer bauble, however streamlined, fashionable and opulent; rather, the car promised nothing less than access to a superhuman power – the power of speed. ‘Rapid motion through space elates one,’ wrote James Joyce in his short story about motor-racing, ‘After the Race’,3 set during the running of the Gordon Bennett Cup race in the environs of Dublin in 1903

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(Joyce 1967: 35–42). Yet, while this new, consumer-accessed experience elated, it also traumatised: here was a consumer good that held out a new promise, the allure of elation, of a thrill, but one sharpened by the low-level terror of constant, mortal danger. To grasp how the pleasure of speed was sharpened by terror, and how this was represented in literature, consider the two fictional texts that may be said to bookend the automobile era. The first, prefiguring the automobile, is a terror text of train travel: Zola’s La Bête humaine (The Human Beast) of 1890; the second, marking the end of the ‘romance’ of automobile travel eighty-three years later, is Ballard’s Crash of 1973.4 These two novels about the horrific jouissance, first, of train speed, then of car speed, both culminate in accounts of horrific crashes. In each, the propulsion of subjective desire, and even the progress of their romance plots, hinge on its culminating, gory crash. In each, the intimate defers to the technological, and technology’s brutality, made manifest in the crash outcome, renders the intimate perverse. Each equates masculinity and driving the train or automobile: in each novel’s logic, humans and technology undergird each other’s power, and women are denied access. Each text’s plot concerns the human trying to catch up to the machine’s tremendous power. Their similarities, however, belie a crucial difference: Zola’s train speed is experienced in part by its passengers, and by its observers from without, as a passive experience, whereas in Ballard’s Crash speeds are experienced primarily by drivers. The personalisation of speed, represented by the move from the passenger experience in the train to the interaction of driver and automobile, is a function of the commodification of technologies. The automobile rendered technological speed subjective: each citizen as a driver got to embody, and participate in, the potential power of velocity. (In La Bête humaine, driving the train was labour, the task of an employee; in Crash, it is leisure.) Ballard’s dystopian text lays bare the potential horror of this new consumer machine. In Crash’s danse macabre, Vaughan’s schemes to crash into the cars of celebrities short-circuits the dream of any new versions of a more alert or energised subject born of this latest collaboration of humans and technology. Possibly the most shocking post-war British novel, Crash makes explicit the stakes in the new stage of techno-consumerism represented by the automobile. The automobile offered all of the rewards of consumerism; it also brought closer to the surface the exploitative end-game underlying all power relations, including the commodity one – the ability to take life, to be killed, or to kill. Between these two poles, between the car in Somerville and Ross and the car in J. G. Ballard, there was the machine’s demand that its users engage each of their senses, pay attention and take control more acutely. This new kind of commodity flaunted all of the glamour of previous commodities, but it also made intense demands of its users. It demanded an effort of attention, of using one’s reflexes, of control, that was thrilling, and which, like other new thrills of the era, from such new sports as skiing to the rides at seaside fairgrounds, promised new realms of heightened sensation, new excitements, new somatic intensities. The car, its utilitarian task to increase the ease of transport, was offered within the logic of the commodity to each individual who could afford to be not simply a passive passenger, but a driver, so that the modern subject-consumer was granted access to a new sensation – the sensation of unprecedented speeds. It gave to people whose lives were increasingly governed by the society of the spectacle something quite contrary: it granted them a sense of power by allowing them each to access this new embodied sensation.

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Most of the various modernisms, when the car entered their field of vision, were themselves either thrilled or terrified, or both – and deployed their own experiments to a maximum to delineate the new experiences that could be enabled by this novel and personalised technological speed. Representing the automobile and its speed promise pushed modernist forms to their limits in the same way that the new technology demanded increased use of their senses from its user–consumers. The remainder of this chapter will explore how one of the senses was twisted and reimagined by the new speed experience: that of sight. Sight, as we shall explore, was put under intense pressure by the simple requirement of a different gaze through the car windscreen, done at speed. The speeding car demanded of its driver a new kind of modern looking: a modernist gaze. This fast gaze, moreover, in the century increasingly given over to Debordian spectacles and Baudrillardian simulation, worked as the commodity’s guarantee that it could still provide access to nothing less than actual sensation and real experience. If speed was a signature achievement of modernity, enabled by technology, then the automobile, which granted access to it for its users, allowed them to feel this modernity in their bones.

Sightlines: Post-Perspectival Modernism Driving and looking, driving and the ferociously alert gaze, the hectic glance in the rear-view mirror, the intense attention to everything in front, the effect of seeing other objects zoom by out of ‘the corner of one’s eye’, the blur with which the camera freezes movement in an instant: speeding and seeing have always had a tumultuous, intense and uneasy relationship. In 1917, Henri Matisse painted ‘The Windshield, On the Road to Villacoublay’,5 showing a stretch of French road seen through a car windscreen. Despite the resolutely conventional scene, the frame of the metal pillars and roof rail – a techno-frame inside the picture’s own ornate one – makes the work a thoroughly unconventional treatment of a standard Impressionist subject. Matisse, through his complex framing of a pastoral scene, makes clear that the possibilities of his observation post, the result of a new technology, are his true subject. The painting asks the viewer what one can see, and how one sees it, through a car window. The little steering wheel, the covers wrapping the posts and bars: these underline the fact that the artist must now make the automobile his studio, or rather, his camera obscura. The machine, made for movement, posits a new view, or a new symphony of simultaneous sight-lines, since the views seen here on each side, beyond the posts, make this a triptych for the age of speed technology, while the split windscreen (early cars used two sheets of glass) introduces a new bifocal horizon line, putting in question the rules of perspective in place since Masaccio. The covered car became, in effect, a giant camera apparatus, with the painter within it. In this painting of the artist’s fascination with what can be seen from an automobile, the complex multiview effect – the doubled front- and two-side views, the extra view propped near the steering-wheel of a conventional painting of the scene, within the already complex painting – implies that nature can be framed by technology, but cannot be contained by it. It is as if mobility, or even its possibility, at some rate of speed, rapidly multiplies what can be seen. Nature can no longer be stilled in order to see it whole. The sloped scenes on each side, for example, suggest unframable infinities. Matisse’s complex juxtaposition of multiple perspectives of the same scene also highlights a fundamental uncanniness in ‘The Windshield, On the Road to Villacoublay’.

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This is underlined by the smaller painting-within-the painting, since it rests against the steering-wheel. With that placing, we are signalled that the car’s driver is missing from the scene. The driver, in effect, is replaced by the painter; the car, given the driver’s absence, cannot be moving. The mobility which excited the painter in its viewing possibilities is the very element that has to be denied, to allow painterly creation; it is as if his frustration at realising this is the very impetus that energises the work, and makes the bland landscape, literally, arresting. Driving or painting: Matisse records here something like the end of the ‘arrested’, still, ‘contemplative’ perspectival gaze before the onslaught of a post-perspectivism demanded by the gaze from the moving automobile. The painting confronts a venerable genre, the painterly view, with the sensory overload enabled by a new technology that demands a new kind of looking. In order to paint the work, the mobile viewing post, whose possibilities are the real subject of the painting, had to be stilled. The artwork, straining to suggest the multiplicity of new perspectives, with its doubled-horizon line, its slipping long views on each side, its painting-within-the painting propped where the driver should be driving – in sum, its mirror-box effect – all imply a limit-gaze, the limit instance of still viewing. (Omitted is a rear-view mirror scene: this piece of looking technology was only patented in 1921). Its uncanny stillness incites us to consider how a scene of movement, seen at speed, might appear. The car, with its leather straps and glass, celebrated in Matisse’s painting as in the first fictional accounts of the car as status symbol and in car advertising, was the supreme commodity. It also marks a new development in the history of reification. Replete even by 1917 with its glass and chrome curves, the car was a glamorous status symbol, but one which offered to overcome the very commodity inertia which ensured that the commodity’s fascination could be read as superficial. Marx had defined reification as the manner in which, in modernity, real relations between people are invariably mediated by commodities; in this scenario, the commodity’s inertia was the index of the anomie that registers as the subject’s apprehension of reification’s failed promise. The speeding automobile promised to overcome the stasis by which the commodity betrayed itself. In a formula that would be employed by other machines-as-commodities since, such as the personal computer, it offered not merely to perform a task faster, but instead, to provide the experience of that speed to the user–consumer. For the first drivers, the car offered more than status and the pleasure of a shiny commodity. It offered the experience of a new sensory overload, a forced new mobilisation of sensory perceptiveness, a stressful, exhilarating rush, of new sensations: the thrill of speed. The young Joyce’s 1904 story ‘After the Race’ toyed with the new allegiances and mis-alliances that would upend standard narratives as an after-effect of this new stimulant. It anticipated by four years the hyperbolic celebration of the speeding, crashing car that opens Filippo Marinetti’s ‘Manifesto of Futurism’ of 1908, which appeared in Le Figaro in February 1909. Subsequent treatments, from Matisse’s 1917 painting to passages in Proust and Woolf, show that the high arts, following on from the excited car chases of early films (from ‘Runaway Match’ of 1903, all the way to the fortyfive-minute car chase in H. B. Halicki’s ‘Gone in Sixty Seconds’ of 1974), were eager to atomise the new visual sensation. In volume 4 of A la recherche de temps perdu, published in 1922, Proust writes of how seeing from a car offers ‘the perspective which sets a castle dancing about with a hill, a church and the sea, while one draws nearer to it however much it tries to huddle beneath its age-old foliage’ (Proust 2003 [1922]: Vol. 4, 550). Summing up her astounded descriptions of the driver’s lines of sight

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from the motorcar in Orlando (1928), Virginia Woolf could write ‘While the motor car shot, swung, squeezed and slid for she was an expert driver, down Regent Street, down Haymarket . . . Nothing could be seen or read from start to finish’ (Woolf 1956: 306–7; see also Woolf 1966).6 Each makes clear that, at least from the moment that car cabs were enclosed, by 1910, and drivers allowed to drive at speed,7 it was the disruption of any fixed and static seeing, experienced through the windscreen of a moving car, that registered the initial incredible speed experience. Disrupted seeing was the first index of the automobile speed’s stress and elation. The various modernisms’ windscreen teletopologies took the impress of the modern reckoning with this technoaesthetic: they register the sense of shock experienced by these first car drivers. This was enabled by high art’s scope for a more flexible and scrupulous mimeticism, its ability to acknowledge the exciting shock at the demands imposed by the new technology. Since the commodity-machines are also proficient at making their users adapt, this is a shock now lost to us, and the gaze at speed that shocked at first has become mundane. The sensory overload arriving through the car windscreen, with scene after scene flying to meet the viewer, signalled a new phase of prosthetic modernity in which the technology pushed its users towards their perceptual limits even as they felt the excitement with which they could be perceived by the speeding eye. Yet the mechanical speed-up worked simply. Through the windscreen of a speeding car the viewer is presented with an unprecedented succession and variety of scenes: a massive sensory overload of roads, nature, signs, structures, people, traffic. With all this flashing before her, the viewer shoulders the task of rapid editing, choosing moment by moment what is important, ignoring the rest, restitching discordant scenes into an improvised narrative. This fluid narrative, in turn, with its intensities and sights semi-seen, must then make sense of the mass of scenes which continue to appear at each moment. The relatively easy rhythm of the flâneur’s gaze, timed to the jaunt of the figure’s gait, had in literary modernism helped launch experimental accounts of this disjointed, streamed looking; the automobile gaze sped it up. It was radically different to the contemplative gaze enabled by a more leisurely culture, one in which the fixing of observation points enabled more legible perspectives. The anxious driver, for example, focuses on a perspectival point, but one that must constantly move, on the road ahead, so that surrounding details are edited out: they become mere blur.8 This blur then constitutes the sign of the limit of the visible in speed viewing. Italian Futurists such as Giacamo Balla were the modernists who experimented most urgently with representing the blur effect. Joyce’s telegraphese used in representing Bloom’s stream of consciousness in Ulysses (Joyce 1985: 150), or the avalanche of sights recorded in seconds in Woolf’s description of the experience of seeing from the car driver’s viewpoint in Orlando (Woolf 1956: 306–7), are close to blur textualities, modernist writing on looking that took its cue in part from attempts to describe the new experience of looking from the speeding automobile. Blur as a visual phenomenon is that excess scene that is excluded by the viewer–sampler, but which intrudes and still declares its presence, remaining at the edge of vision as a persistent shadowland that hints at the unconscious, the ghostly, the existence of the repressed or ignored. Blur’s presence also implies that to observe at speed is to run the risk that scenes, and certainties about them, are liable to be decomposed and frayed. In this way, the look from the moving automobile, and the attempt to translate into text the result of what one saw at speed, form one basis of the representational and textual obscurity of much modernist writing.

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The other new invention, the movie camera, may be considered the technological answer to the problems posed by the speed gaze. In early popular film, however, in contrast to early twentieth-century experimental textuality, new kinds of movementimage, such as the tracking shot – in which the movie camera, on a track, rapidly shot successive images as it moved (see Duffy and Boscagli 2021) – the closeup, and new ways to narrate the resultant spectacle such as fast editing, remained legible to viewers, and therefore appeared ‘natural’ to them, because of the match between the new medium and its spectacle. The moving camera could match its speed to the moving scene – for example, in scenes of the car chase: ‘Car chase films represent the fusion of mind and machine, in which the will becomes manifest through mechanization,’ as film historian Harvey O’Brien puts it (2012: 34).9 The movie camera, in other words, was comfortable with seeing at speed in a way that literary forms (Proust, Woolf) and art forms (Matisse, Balla), rapidly adapting though they were, could never be. Yet this discomfort with describing the new sensation of speed, and in adapting their prose to the pulse of the new speeded-up technosphere, meant that text, painting and sculpture could best capture the shock of this particular new. It could also, possibly, better consider its implications. To the scenic overload of seeing through a car windscreen was added a further uncertainty: the suspicion, fostered by the blur at the edge of vision and suggested by the presence of the intervening, transparent windscreen, that what is beyond it may have no material existence at all. The scene outside, whizzing by, might merely be a virtuality. One might think that constant exposure to new scenes, bearing in for their split-second closeup, could make what was seen in this way and at this rate more tangible. Seen from within the closed car, however, from inside a cinema looking at a screen or simply from behind a camera, the screen-frame invites the viewer to entertain the visible in the first place as a representation. What is seen through the windscreen is constantly othered in an heterotopising10 look. The apparently mundane gaze of the driver through a car windscreen, therefore, turns out to be a radically bifurcated experience, and the epitome of a contradiction at the heart of modernism.11 Everything seen through the ‘pare-brise’ flies up close, only to be cast aside in a blur, and, at the same time, everything appears as on a screen, a simulation. These contrasting tendencies neatly partake of the two contrasting, most often used accounts of what it means to live, to see and to sense in modernity. On the one hand, the mass-of-onrushing-scenes scenario is one of the best examples in the modernist era of the shocking, overstimulating, hyperfatiguing modernist urban experience described by early sociologists such as Georg Simmel in ‘Metropolis and Mental Life’. Simmel speaks of ‘the intensification of nervous stimulation – the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions’ (1950: 410). On the other hand, the suspicion that the scene seen through the windscreen is merely that – an image – evokes the persistent counter-description of modern existence as narcoticised, anomie-riven flânerie in a dreamscape of consumerist images, a keynote of the urban milieu delineated by Benjamin (Benjamin 2002) and theorised by Adorno (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002). The question posed by our simple example of what was, around 1900, a newly possible action – of looking through the windscreen of a speeding car – is this: how can these two accounts of modernist experience exist in tandem? For the contemporary reader, this question persists: how do readings that stress spectacle as the logical conclusion of Marx’s account of

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modernity as mass reification jibe with those more excited readings of the modernist experience as one about getting up close to ‘the shock of the new’? Critiques of modernism have largely subsumed the reading of modernist obscurity as evidence of shocking sensory overload into another, which considers this obscurity to result from the text’s registering of the blasé-riven blandness of modern reified culture. The modernist artwork’s value gets cast as a quiet revolution: it subverts. Fredric Jameson gifted critics of modernism with the critical tools to grasp how every experimental work, despite itself, exemplified ideological self-incrimination: the more obscure a work, the more its aesthetic task could be understood as revealing that the culture from which it arose was ‘a document of barbarism’.12 Readings in his wake tend to cast the modernist artwork as a fragment that emerges from a Simmelean modernist urban milieu of shock, which then uses that shock, heightened aesthetically, as a weapon against the complacency of the consumerist dreamland. One issue with this critical view, when it meets the test of material history, is that for an early twentiethcentury Western bourgeois subject, the actual shock, impossible to avoid, that came from engaging with the new technologies of the day was much greater than the presumed shock posed by the aesthetic obscurities employed to represent it. The shock of experiencing unprecedented speeds, and looking while doing so, was greater than the shock of reading about it in avant-garde prose. This suggests why critics should offer some space to that maligned construct, technological determinism. Post-Adornian defences of the highest culture, if they uncritically fetishise shock as merely an artistic uber-gesture, need to be coupled with a grasp of the effects of material changes brought about by science and technology. A fully materialist reading of the effects of new technologies of the modernist moment, from the telephone to the automobile to mass electrification, would read actual shock in all its varieties, as an experienced, sensational stimulus and event, which itself incited modernist experiment.13 What exactly happens when we are shocked? The newly agitated gaze through the car windscreen – a modernist pare-brise teletopology – reminds us that shock implies physiological disruption, prior to any cognitive or quasi-mystical change. Shock involves not just a bolt of aesthetic force that leads to a moment of (re)cognition. To describe shock simply in terms of the gaining of insight is to read modernist art as merely conceptual. More, such readings tempt us to underestimate the disruptive effects of other kinds of innovation, to imply that culture has a monopoly on shock. Reacting to new technologies, for example, shock-effects are registered by users as a perceptual, sensory, visceral limit, one which, first, begs to be described in all its complex details. Only in the second place might it alter the subject’s ‘field of vision’, after it achieves a resetting of the set of perceptual and sensory possibilities that would determine the scope of any new insight. Consider the driver’s gaze through the windscreen of an automobile round 1900, and its sensory overload of shocked seeing: undermined is the subject’s sense of space, her place in it. For the nearest account of how this unfolded, and to begin to grasp its implications, we must turn briefly to the work of the great modern philosopher of memory-images, Henri Bergson. Bergson’s Matter and Memory, published in 1896 almost simultaneously with the first viable motorcars and the first films, is a meditation on moving images. It outlines a theory of how mental images are accessed by memory, and it describes how this must recast the ways we conceptualise both space and time. Aptly for any account of seeing at speed, Bergson’s whole system is based upon an analysis of what the moving subject

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perceives. As his foremost explicator, Gilles Deleuze, explains, movement for Bergson is not reducible to mapped instances in conventionally conceptualised, that is, static, spaces. (Likewise, he does not think of images as ‘filed away,’ ready for retrieval.) Bergson’s image, Deleuze proves, is rather always in transit or in flow; as Deleuze notes, ‘It will always occur in the interval between the two [fixed points], in other words behind your back’ (1986: 104). This is Deleuze’s definition of Bergson’s durée and it is the flowing space in which, he claims, change occurs. Bergson, in other words, reimagines space as an entity dynamically produced through motion, rather than an abstraction that must always be thought to precede motion. Space, in his term, is an unfolding. Since this unfolding must be perceived, Bergson’s account is derived from examinations of subjective experience. This stress, on the one hand, on what is experienced – subjectively, through the senses, beginning with sight – and on the other, on what occurs between any two hypothetical fixed points, that is, ‘behind one’s back’, might appear to correspond to the dialectic we posited earlier in readings of modernist representations, between the reading that privileges the barrage of sensory experience and the alternative reading which begins with the suspicion that what is perceived is a mere representation, a spectacle. Since Bergson’s formulation privileges a durée which invariably occurs exactly when one is not quite looking, that is, ‘behind one’s back’, it always threatens to slide into a metaphysics. Bergson’s metaphysical tendencies, despite the materialist basis for his speculations – like both William James and Sigmund Freud, he grounded his theory in what he had himself observed – help account for the enormous interest in his work in his day, and the relative obscurity into which it has fallen since. If, however, we look at the artistic productions influenced by Bergson, we discover artists fascinated by the promise of technologically enabled velocity, but trapped at his departure point: the belief that what matters is the perception of the moving subject. Take, for example, much of the painterly work of the Italian Futurists. For Balla and Bocconi, despite the manifestos, art experiments in representing speed often resolve around a fixed point, turning on a single subject or crowd, whether human or animal. Speed, in Futurist painting, tends to be represented as a vortex, rather than a blur. One example of many is the horses of Corrado Forlin’s painting of the Palio, ‘Splendore simultaneo del Palio di Siena’, of 1937.14 The effect of Futurist images and sculptures of racers, athletes, horses and birds, therefore, is to recast the Bergsonian flux into a glorification of a Nietzschean (or, at least, d’Annunzian) will to power – power achievable, the message becomes, by harnessing new technologies of personal speed. Similarly, the innovative photographer of speeding cars, Jacques-Henri Lartigue (see Baring 2020), nevertheless centres almost every image on a still point which comes to signify the racing-car driver’s will, so that the images work in the final instance as glorifications of latter-day heroes. How can modernist art both be subjective and, at the same time, describe what happens ‘behind one’s back’, especially in relation to new ways of how to see? If we survey the whole early twentieth-century art field of ‘car art’, from the sketches in early car magazines to the streamline moderne of Tamara de Lempicka’s ‘Self Portrait in the Green Bugatti’ of 1925, what one finds is image after image which celebrates the driver as privileged hero, one now posed seated, but accruing the force of the commodity, the car itself, and the propulsion engine that is new in it. The old heroic seated pose had placed the hero atop a horse; the new car seats tended lower, lower even than the cyclists celebrated in another genre of speed images such as Jean Metzinger’s

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‘Au vélodrome’ (1912).15 Their Nietzschean determination16 had to be represented by intimations of their intensity. Yet one also on occasion comes across another view: attempts to show what the driver saw through the car windscreen. We are back, then, to Matisse’s ‘The Windshield, On the Road to Villacoublay’, to photos, film shots and paintings, works which show ostensibly empty cars, where the viewer is supposed to put herself in the place of the non-existent driver. This is by no means the ‘death of the subject’, but rather, a stratagem to force one into complete subjective identification – a call for the viewer to situate her subjectivity in place of the missing one at the wheel. It is not, then, a case of the subject being erased by the speed of technology. Rather, it is a challenge to the viewer to call up, for herself, a more complex notion of the relation of new intensities of sensing, particularly of seeing, to a sense of self. In Deleuze’s terms, this would be the modernist achievement of a body without organs. This is precisely where literature – which, despite its professed desire, at its most intense moments in post-Romantic mode, to conjure ‘images’ (which, in fact, can tell only of what is beneath the scrim of text) – scores over actual images, such as paintings, photographs, even film scenes. This occurs, on the one hand, when the writer him- or herself takes the wheel: in autobiographies of early racing-car drivers, and later, tales built around car journeys, such as Flannery O’Connor’s ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ (1955) and passages from the long line of road novels, from Evelyn Waugh’s account of his Abyssinian travels (1937) to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957). In them, one can map how the act of seeing at speed never really ceased to shock, even as it became normalised. More significant, however, is the manner in which this newly feverish looking demanded of the automobile driver by the new technology came to influence accounts of seeing and the seen heavily, even when the writing in question has nothing overtly to do with speed movement and automobiles. Take the most characteristic new strategy of modernist prose, ‘stream of consciousness’. Far from being a careful annotation of all that Clarissa Dalloway, Leopold Bloom or J. Alfred Prufrock thinks moment by moment, it functions, rather, very much as does Matisse’s image of the driverless car. Just as that image forces us to project ourselves inside the car as inside a giant movie camera, and imagine what we see out of it, so too ‘stream of consciousness’ forces readers into the unprecedented task of, as it were, climbing into the very body of the character described and seeing, hearing and so on out of that character’s senses. Not even the movies, modernism’s own new art form and the medium which brought the new technology of the movie camera to the task of looking at speed, could quite equal this. Despite its experiments, such as the extreme closeup, it persisted in presenting to the viewer the seen as heterotopic spectacle: it still derived its logic from the idea of the seen as a view. ‘Stream of consciousness’, like film, offers an unfolding view but it sets itself a single rule: the stream-view, the flow-view, must always be through the character’s own eyes, never the imagined view from without. With it, we as reader–viewers, coerced into complicity with a subjectivity so total that it does not allow us to heroicise its seeing subject, can only map a scene not as a ‘scene’, but as an ‘unfolding’, as Bergson understood space as seen. This unfolding, moreover, is not a matter of a series of ‘insights’ – a term with its origins in metaphysics – since that procedure would enable us to map once again the empty, static space we want to imagine the character inhabits. (The critic, like the detective-story reader searching for ‘clues’, can only do that with ‘hindsight’, a retrospective look.) Rather, the ‘stream of

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consciousness’ maps an adrenaline-fuelled, neurasthenic series of reactions to stimuli, a fraught and continuously improvised series of nervous reactions which, as we read, we are forced to experience in lieu of the character in the text which is prompting us to do so. The achievement of this new readerly self-projection even at the level of the reader’s bodily sensation is, for the reader of modernist prose, truly new and shock-inducing. To grasp this, and to track it, as a seismograph measures tremors, would be to give modernist shock the detailed respect it is due, and to register how new technologies have rendered possible the sensation of this continuous and visceral kind of shockeffect. It would give tremulous modern bodies, which, in most Futurist paintings, are cast as in competition with the new machines, the kind of attention that registers their tremors and considers their significance. It would allow us to acknowledge forthrightly how, in many modernisms of speed and otherwise, imperialist–racist mindsets, the objectification of women, the snobbish approval of status and wealth, were unchanged or even heightened. It would also open a space, however, to understand the real change in human perception that was being ushered in by the technological prosthesis, and thereby to grasp its utopian potential. It would allow us to map the potential for future positive change propelled and empowered by speed.

Notes   1. The ‘Irish R.M.’ stories were collected as Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. (1899), Further Experiences of an Irish R.M. (1908) and In Mr. Knox’s Country (1915).   2. On gender and the modernist automobile, see Thacker (2006: 175–89).   3. See Owens (2013).   4. On speed and masculinity in La Bête humaine, see Boscagli (1996: 78–80).   5. This painting is now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Under the heading ‘The Aesthetics of the Windshield’, Sara Danius writes about it as ‘a complicated play of frames’; she gives as its title ‘La Pare-brise: sur la route de Villacoublay (The Windshield)’. See Danius (1995: 136). Danius notes that the painting was ‘conceived during a motoring trip in southern France in 1916’; Villacoublay, as the online notes for the painting on the Cleveland Museum website states, is outside Paris. The airbase there, to which the car is apparently being driven, was established in 1911 and is still in use: it was from there that the remains of Princess Diana, who died in one of the most notorious car crashes of modern times, were flown back to Britain.   6. Hilary Clark sees Woolf’s piece as a female riposte to the male flâneur of many modernist works, and speaks of ‘epiphany as rape’ (2004: 5) in this account of how fluid, gendered perception at speed brings feelings to a crisis.   7. The limit was set at twenty miles per hour in Britain in 1903, all limits were abolished in 1930, and a 30 mph speed limit in ‘built-up areas’ was reintroduced in 1935.   8. This is an extension of the argument I have made in Duffy (2009).   9. O’Brien cites Bullitt (1968, USA, directed by Peter Yates) and Week-end (1967, France, directed by Jean-Luc Godard). 10. See Foucault (1986). 11. For a somewhat different account of how the modernist automobile intervenes in early twenty-first-century critiques of modernism, see Leonard (2009: 221–41). 12. The phrase, from Walter Benjamin, is quoted as the epigram to Chapter 6, ‘Conclusion: The Dialectics of Utopia and Ideology’, by Fredric Jameson (1981: 281). In full: ‘There has never been a document of culture which was not at one and the same time a document of barbarism.’

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13. For rich readings of the scope and implications of modernism, dynamism and the kinetic, see Bradshaw et al. (2016). 14. Corrado Forlin’s painting is reproduced in Tylus (2015: Fig. 2, p. 9). Oil on canvas. Private collection, Venice. Photograph by Matteo Chinellato. 15. Jean Metzinger, ‘Au vélodrome’, 1912, Peggy Guggenheim Museum, Venice. See Cycling, Cubo-Futurism and the Fourth Dimension, Erasmus Weddigen, curator, The Guggenheim Foundation, New York, Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 9 June–16 September 2012 (exhibition catalogue). 16. ‘Everything I see is in principle within my reach, at least within reach of my sight, marked by the map of “I Can”.’ Paul Virilio attributes this quote, which sums up the critique of the Futurist representations of speed, to Merleau-Ponty. See Virilio (1994: 7).

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer (2002 [1944]), ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Ballard, J. G. (1985 [1973]), Crash. New York: Vintage. Baring, Louise (2020), Lartigue: The Boy and the Belle Époque. London: Thames & Hudson. Benjamin, Walter (2002), The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Boscagli. Maurizia (1996), The Eye on the Flesh: Fashions of Masculinity in the Early 20th Century. Boulder, CO: Westview/Harper Collins. Bradshaw, David, Laura Marcus and Rebecca Roach, eds (2016), Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clark, Hilary (2004), ‘The Travelling Self in Virginia Woolf’s “Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car”’, Virginia Woolf Miscellany (Fall/Winter), pp. 6–8. Danius, Sara (1995), The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception and Aesthetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1986), Cinema I: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Duffy, Enda (2009), ‘Blur: Rapid Eye Movement and the Visuality of Speed’, in The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 157–98. Duffy, Enda and Maurizia Boscagli (2021), ‘Cabiria’, in A Modernist Cinema, ed. Michael Valdez Moses and Scott Klein. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foucault, Michel (1986), ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, 16 (Spring), pp. 22–7. Jameson Fredric (1981), The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Joyce, James (1967 [1914]), ‘After the Race’, Dubliners. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 35–42. Joyce, James (1985), Ulysses, ed. Hans Gabler. New York: Vintage. Kerouac, Jack (1957), On the Road. New York: Viking Press. Leonard, Garry (2009), ‘“The Famished Roar of Automobiles”: Modernity, the Internal Combustion Engine, and Modernism’, in Disciplining Modernism, ed. Pamela Caughie. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 221–41. Moore, George (1894), Esther Waters. London: Walter Scott. O’Brien, Harvey (2012), Action Movies: The Cinema of Striking Back. New York: Short Cuts, Wallflower Books/Columbia University Press. O’Connor, Flannery (1955), ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ and Other Stories. New York: Harcourt Brace. Owens, Colin (2013), Before Daybreak: ‘After the Race’ and the Origins of Joyce’s Art. Gainsville: University of Florida Press.

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Proust, Marcel (2003), In Search of Lost Time, trans. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin and Andreas Major, revised J. D. Enright. New York: Modern Library. Sewell, Anna (1877), Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse. London: Jarrold and Sons. Simmel, Georg (1950 [1903]), ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. K. H. Wolff. New York: Free Press, pp. 409–24. Somerville E. Œ and Martin Ross (1984 [1899–1915]), The Irish R.M. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Thacker, Andrew (2006), ‘Traffic, Gender, Modernism’, The Sociological Review, 54: 1 (October), pp. 175–89. Tylus, Jane (2015), Siena, City of Secrets. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Virilio, Paul (1994), The Vision Machine, trans. Julie Rose. London and Bloomington, IN: British Film Institute. Waugh, Evelyn (2010 [1931]), Remote People: A Report from Ethiopia & British Africa 1930–31. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Woolf, Virginia (1956 [1928]), Orlando. New York: Harcourt Brace. Woolf, Virginia (1966), ‘Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car’, in Collected Essays, Vol. 2. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 290–2. Zola, Emile (1977 [1890]), La Bête humaine, trans. Leonard Tancock. London: Penguin.

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6 Aeroplanes: Rethinking Aeriality in a Long 1930s Leo Mellor

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he virtuosic opening of W. H. Auden’s ‘Poem XXX’ from March 1930 – with its aircraft, pilots and aerial views – has proved enticingly talismanic for many accounts of interwar literature: Consider this and in our time As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman: The clouds rift suddenly – look there At cigarette-end smouldering on a border At the first garden party of the year. (Auden 1977: 46) Our dependency on Auden’s observer is established in these first lines; and then the omnipotence of his view, with its ability to target or focus on details, carries the line of sight into the, as yet, peaceful garden party. Later in the poem he has moved much further on, and (with his wirelesses and dance bands and interconnectivity) he negotiates technology and agency, imperative urgency and the possibilities of recounting sensations. These processes mean both trying to delineate where the human stops and where the machine begins, and trying to find a language for the strange sensations the machine enforces upon the human subject. Many have read this poem as overdetermined by its opening, which reveals Auden’s totalitarian desires for allying his poetic viewpoint with the kestrel/bomber, and shows contempt for the little lives below which could be snuffed out at will (Cunningham 1988: 192). But there is a much better example from Auden’s writing for thinking about the multiple facets of aeriality. It is formally inventive and wildly unsatisfying, as well as being full of jokes that are never quite jokes and (nearly) entirely hawkless: it is ‘The Journal of an Airman’, the central section of The Orators (1932). This journal of a flyer, engaged in both introspection and fomenting an uprising, oscillates between registers of sub-Buchanesque bluff bravado and fin-de-siècle poised camp. It is a bricolage of prose epigrams, sestinas, doggerel, alphabets, genetic diagrams and telegraphese, as well as accomplished descriptions of aircraft maintenance, introspective diary-keeping, wished-for genealogies, letters to wounds, nightmares and fantasias of totalising attacks. But it is also manically elusive, ‘endlessly hinting at a secret narrative the reader is duty bound to track down’ (Smith 1994: 313). The clues come thick and fast – whether scraps of information from apparent spies, the

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list of possible airbases at ‘Stubba, Smirirndale, Hamar and Sullom’ (1977: 76) or the very idea of reconnaissance. There is mordant humour and horrific images but, then, calm and perspective: ‘dawn, 13,000 feet. Shadows of struts falling across the cockpit. Perfect calm, light, strength. Yesterday positively the last time. Hands to remember please, always’ (1977: 84). Even the final climactic sequence contains the airman’s chivalric attempt to purify himself before his fate: Read Mifflin on Air Currents. A complete course for the commercial flying licence. The life of Count Zeppelin (obtainable in Air and Airways Library). Remember to pay Bryden’s Bill. To answer C’s letter. The £100 for Tom’s holiday. Destroy all letters, snapshots, lockets, etc., of E. Further purification. Deep breathing exercises instead of smoking. A clean shirt, collar and handkerchief each morning till the end. (Auden 1977: 94) ‘The Journal of an Airman’ matters as it illustrates two interlocking tendencies concerning aeriality in writing of the period, tendencies which have been obscured or elided by the literary-critical focus on the hawk-like and death-bringing aerial view. These more interesting tendencies are potent as they can be seen in more expansive (and more comprehensible) length in much writing across many genres and authors. The tendencies are these: first, that the view from the plane offers a connective way of seeing patterns and shapes, both those literally spread out below and those implicit within culture and society; unsurprisingly such a vision is often strange, paranoiac and revelatory.1 Second, such vistas and sights affect the body doing the perceiving when airborne, giving rise to a panoply of new (again, often paranoiac) corporeal sensations, from excitement to estrangement. The desire-for-destruction-from-above is still there, but it is part of a weirder and wilder cultural firmament: one which looks outward to the totality of the horizon and inward to nausea, euphoria and mania, with both scales cross-hatched together like overlapping vapour trails on a summer’s day.2 Thus, this chapter shows why British writers of a ‘long 1930s’ or mid-century, stretching from approximately 1926 to 1951, used the aesthetic possibilities offered by flight to describe the violent and tumultuous world around them – and to test how language might capture the extreme sensations of pleasure, conflict and fear. The extended time period is deliberate, as it stress-tests some of these ideas by seeing how they were altered by the actualities of aeriality and bombardment during the Second World War.3 There are multiple contexts for how these texts were received when first published, but one of the most important was the growing aerial literacy, or ‘airmindedness’ as it were, of readers – or rather of spectators,4 for as well as popular accounts of heroic extended flights, and the live air-pageants staged by the Royal Air Force every year, there was the increasingly common and powerful effect of actual images brought back from above or created within a studio to give the simulacrum of flight. All of the writers under consideration here owe something to the paradigms created by the

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visual treatment of aeriality, as both cultural fear and easily accessible route to the sublime. The works of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, especially Southern Mail (1929) and Night Flight (1931), and their 1930s film adaptations, offer templates. But so too do detective thrillers such as Freeman Wills Crofts’s The 12.30 from Croydon (1934), as do, inevitably, the science-fiction novels which, immediately after the First World War, had offered varieties of extrapolation from real biplanes and primitive navigation into imagined armadas of airships and totalising destruction, such as in Anderson Graham’s The Collapse of Homo Sapiens (1923).5 Such future fears lie outside the scope of this chapter, but their origins most certainly belong in the paranoia and unease of the awkwardly aerial body and in the glimpses of new vistas.

Uses of Nausea Graham Greene’s novella The Bear Fell Free (1935) is now sadly almost completely elided from his œuvre. It is a highly-wrought work in both senses: deeply mannered and near hysterical. This is a text about loyalty and deception which plays with the iconography of aircraft – and the airmen who cling to their totemic toys – in a nonlinear stream of consciousness: one that awkwardly weaves together a performative masculinity with guilty and traumatised memories of the First World War. The plot is basic: a man goes on a flying expedition, leaving behind a party in the English countryside, and yet the expected narrative/flight arc is punctured by fragments of memory and dialogue – until his plane crashes and the alluring lights of New York go unvisited. The take-off, however, seems initially all about new perspectives: Heavy wheel, steel polished struts, lay on the swelling air, pressed it down towards the tents, the landladies, the fathers sleeping under handkerchiefs, the child sick behind the breakwater, the wooden spade rotting behind a rock, the Daily Mail reporter inspecting serial couples; they lay over life, the pool, the rocks, the yellow crawling tide; at the height one should have made some pertinent elder-statesman pronouncement, something serious and sad about suffering humanity, but all one felt was this growing fear, this conviction that there had been a mistake. (Greene 1935: n.p.) A gap is visible here between what the pilot expects, that the view will allow him a sonorous ‘pronouncement’ over all those objects with their Audenesque definite articles, and what he actually ‘felt’, a growing inarticulate dread (with added nausea). Nowhere in the novella is this dread elucidated, but at the final moment of impact into the Atlantic waves, the mascot and signifier of dandyism – the teddy bear – falls free. A body of sorts thus gets to survive, but it is only the nostalgic comfort toy. Thus aviator masculinity in Greene is spelled out bleakly: it is the sense that while the accident, like so many in the interwar period, was due to a ‘mistake’, life itself might well now be mistaken and unviable – a sickness unto death. Evelyn Waugh was another author who relished the teddy bear as a mascot and signifier of dandyism in Brideshead Revisited, but it is in his Vile Bodies (1930) that aeriality matters most. At the close of the novel, Ginger and Nina (ill matched and ill prepared for both flight and marriage) take off on their honeymoon. The exchange that follows shows how sensations (of how the world is perceived) can lead directly

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to sensations (within the body), but also how such a link deflates aerial romanticism. Ginger attempts to quote some Shakespeare at Nina – but what she actually sees is not the ‘sceptr’d isle’ he has been claiming such a vantage point allows. Rather: Nina looked down and saw inclined at an odd angle a horizon of straggling red suburb; arterial roads dotted with little cars; factories, some of them working, others empty and decaying; a disused canal; some distant hills sown with bungalows; wireless masts and overhead power cables; men and women were indiscernible except as tiny spots; they were marrying and shopping and making money and having children. The scene lurched and tilted again as the aeroplane struck a current of air. ‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ said Nina. ‘Poor little girl,’ said Ginger. ‘That’s what the paper bags are for.’ (Waugh 2000: 168) Here, brutally combined, come the (mixed, complex) sensations of matter and melancholia elicited by the iteration of the scene, all sickeningly sliding together in a paratactical blur of verbs despite the distance; and then, directly afterwards, the authentic corporeal sensations of the body – and the bathos of the sick-bag. Purgative repugnance is one response to ‘reading’ the ground from above, but there were other uses in feeling very sick at 10,000 feet – and one of them was detection. Christopher St John Spriggs, better known by his pseudonym, Christopher Caudwell, combined theory and praxis in his twenty-nine years before being killed in the Spanish Civil War. His essays, posthumously collected as Illusion and Reality (1937) and Studies in a Dying Culture (1938), have remained a touchstone for any genealogy of British Marxist thought; yet in his formative years he was mainly known as a writer of successful thrillers and studies of aviation, such as The Airship: Its Design, History, Operation and Future (1931). His novel, Death of an Airman (1934), shows how sensations, and the apprehension of the strange sensations of aeriality, could be utilised as part of a schematic structure – whether of detection or political theory. Even the long debates that his theorising provoked after his death culminated in a magisterial judgement by E. P. Thompson which took the theorist back, for one last time, to the air: ‘it is not difficult to see Caudwell as a phenomenon – as an extraordinary shooting-star crossing England’s empirical night – as a premonitory sign of a more sophisticated Marxism’ (Thompson 1995: 306). In Death of an Airman what matters is how the amateur detective, a Bishop from Australia who is learning to fly at a rundown aerodrome – staffed with clichés of flappers and hard-bitten pilots – uses the fact that, unlike everyone else, he is a novice and thus can still trust the feelings of acute internal discomfort aircraft give him: The Bishop clutched the side of his seat. Surely they were going to hit the ground! His inner being oozed away as the machine stood on its tail, flicked over on one wing tip, both wings vertical, and rotated round the tip in a turn that for the first time made the Bishop realise what a high-speed manoeuvre on an aeroplane was like. (Caudwell 2015: 107) His systematic unease makes him a bad pilot but a good detective. He uncovers how the intricacies of capitalism allow a network of pan-European drug-smuggling, one

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where the ever-changing patterns of fog, exchange rates and airmail newspaper distribution are all germane – to both the intricacies of a genre-based plot and a hidden ideological structure.

Patterns Some patterns (commercial, technological) shaped interwar aviation, while some others were revealed by the newly available viewpoints, with archaeology being a classic case (Hauser 2007). Another set of patterns were also, fundamentally, political – aircraft showed how connectivity mattered, as well as themselves being part of the connection (Trotter 2013). Malcolm Lowry’s vast early novel, In Ballast to the White Sea, written in the early 1930s and supposed lost until recent years, is obsessed with interrelation. The opening pages show air as the key conduit of information: The two undergraduates looked down from Castle Hill on the old English town. [. . .] A brawling wind carried from the railway station, which never slumbered, the racket of the acceleration of engines, shunting the drowsy carriages [. . .] [T]he brothers inclined their ears to the cheering at a football match, now to the jaunty music – loud, loud – of the hurdy-gurdies on Midsummer Common: but again these clusters of sound, each of them a hail and farewell from separate worlds of objectivity, would die away almost in the swelling, as the groan of aeroplane engines quickly vanishes to a sigh in the gale. (Lowry 2014: 3) There is – amazingly – no actual aircraft in this scene, but rather it is the idea of the aircraft that is indexical to knowing a soundscape, and so feeling the connections between such ‘separate worlds of objectivity’. Later in the novel such ideas of connections are made urgent – and carried via a fully physically realised plane with a pensive pilot bringing news: ‘[a] lone airman, that wintry Easter, was flying over the Irish Sea. He was following the line of the old telegraph stations to Liverpool: Holyhead, Cefn Du, Point Lynas, Puffin Island, Great Ormes Head. [. . .] Like a needle his machine threaded cloud and cloud. (184) The plane follows a past line of communication but now with extraordinary speed. And yet this vision of modernity-as-progress is then faced with a terrifying view: From the air it seemed like part of a country of the future, which had spread horizontally rather than vertically, but of a stupendous greatness [. . .] a continual, raving flux, beginning at one end of the world and ending at the other [. . .] The industrial revolution! Lancashire, thought the pilot, was certainly the county where that age had driven down its roots. Glass, factories, and cotton mills, weaving sheds, puddling furnaces, docks and dynamos, railways running on three levels . . . and intertwining them, a green, windblown countryside, thundering with horses’ hooves, jagged with colour, groaning with crowds at the racetrack and at rugby matches, and the whole cabled and flexed with steel rivers and canals. It was marvellous but where was it going to all lead? (185)

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Where indeed? The passage above – where free indirect discourse channels the airman’s thoughts – leaves readers as nauseous eavesdroppers in the cockpit: excited by the futurist patterns of industry from above, but also haunted by the thought that this version of the sublime is filled with ominous potential, both of collective madness – the ‘raving flux’ – and of looming war. John Sommerfeld also used aeriality as diagnostic, seeing pattern and potential in the view from above. His May Day (1936) presents London as a city ripe for revolution by seeing it as a complexly woven mesh, even down to repeated spider’s-web metaphors, but with the repeated injunction that ‘a big change’ is needed (Sommerfield 2010: 41, 241). Yet his mode itself is also a critique: he contends that previous attempts at city narrative have failed because they lacked a point of view which could encompass both the directionlessness of individual lives and the potential of the working class. May Day, however, opens with a view, both vertiginous and totalising, which shows how interconnectivity is modern urban existence: there are shining tarred roads, glistening shop windows, arc lamps nightly flowering into electric buds, geometries of telephone wires and tramlines, traffic lights flinging continuous coloured fireworks in the air, a hundred thousand motorcars and buses [. . .] Railways writhe like worms under the clay, tangled with spider’s webs and mazes of electric cables, drains and gaspipes. Then there are eight or nine million people. [. . .] In this whirlpool of matter-in-motion forces are at work creating history. These fragile shreds of flesh are protagonists in a battle. (25–6) Another marker of May Day’s complexity is the way it is ready to indict capitalism, but it is also not naïve about the glamour that the oppressive city can project. It links spectacle with vulnerability and fear, through a return to aeriality: The red-hot worms of neon bulbs squirmed and wriggled. Searchlights, big guns bombarding the air with rays of absinthe green and rose-pink projected the names of automobiles and film stars onto a moving screen of clouds. The whole sky glowed with a dull red heat from the violence of the electric blows that were showered upon it. Ten thousand feet above, a flock of aeroplanes scattered themselves. This was a week of aerial night manoeuvres, raids were being staged to find the weak points in a barbed-wire fence of searchlights that laced the sky around London. These had got through. (189) These ‘worms [. . .] wriggling’ might just have come all the way from Woolf’s essay ‘The Cinema’ (1926), with its blot on the frame of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, but as part of the web of explosive neon hieroglyphs of London they are more familiar from novels such as Gerald Kersh’s Night and the City (1938). Yet this passage is rather different from either Woolf or Kersh: the illuminatory ‘bombardment’ upwards from the signs reverses the practice run of the bombers which look down on them as an ersatz aiming point. This is rehearsal: the implied next step in the causal chain would surely be a real attack. But before that comes there is the insurrectionary hope of May Day. A vast demonstration, whose scale cannot be fully comprehended from any earth-bound perspective, goes ahead, and yet it is understood as a portent through surveillance from a primitive helicopter:

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A thousand feet above the contingents a police gyrocopter, its windmill sails flickering lazily in the blue air. The observer, looking down, saw the marchers, a long black snake, a slow-moving black river winding along the channels of the streets [. . .] [T]he dark mass flows through the streets, meanders like some caterpillar crawling across a map of London, its head a mile away from its tail, its red spots the colours of banners. (210–11) This flickering vision below the eye-in-the-sky is that of a cityscape not reduced to abstraction but rather one animalistically animated by a mass of workers, as it is seen ‘crawling’ across London to be born.

Networks and Fears Patterns can mean many things in culture – and an aerial view stimulated many other artists and writers, from Anni Albers to Gertrude Stein.6 But seeing not a pattern but rather a network – with connective energies flowing between nodes – allows for a rather different aesthetic. Elizabeth Bowen’s novel To the North (1932) is a study of the inadequacy of language and the capriciousness of desire, even in conditions of economic privilege. But it is also a piece of what can be understood as ‘transit literature’ – in that it investigates how movement corrals language and action, but also forces them into new and deliberate patterns (Trotter 2013: 218–63). The protagonists of the novel are nonchalant Cecilia, who flirts and reads at will, and Emmeline, who runs a travel agency and whose movements are preordained by knowledge of routes and connections, until she ‘fuses with the “shadowy nets” of transportation: the railways, airlines, and shipping routes whose schedules she knows by heart’ (Ellmann 2003: 109). Her entanglements throughout the novel culminate in a litany of human agency as movement on a grand scale: ‘an immense idea of departure – expresses getting steam up and crashing from termini, liners clearing the docks, the shadows of planes rising, caravans winding out into the first dip of the desert – possessed her spirit’ (Bowen 1987: 244). Thus thinking about this novel as one of selfhood shaped by the material conditions of modernity, whether by telephones or express trains, reveals much about why technology might change whatever we might recognise as character in a novel. But aircraft, and what aircraft do to the changing selfhood of characters, might also test the limits of narration and mutuality. Bowen stages a London–Paris flight at a key point in To the North, one that is both liberatory and subject-altering to her ambiguous protagonists. Emmeline and the appalling Markie (Mark Drinkwater) fly together from Croydon, and Markie notices as the aircraft climbs that Surrey and Kent looked flatter and like something with which one has ceased to have any relationship, noticeably less interesting – he had never liked either much. The grass, lawns and meadows, poorer in texture than he expected, looked like a rubbed billiard cloth. (136) His ability to render bathetic tedium from a vista guards him against the manic wonder which overtakes Emmeline: ‘the serrated gold coast-line and creeping line of the sea were verifying the atlas. An intenser green blue, opaque with its own colour, showed far down in the sparkling glassiness their tiny cruciform shadow’ (137). Such a view

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cannot last – and arrival is heralded with both familiarity and dread: ‘blood roared in ears as the plane with engines shut off, with a frightening cessation of sound plunged downwards in that arrival that always appears disastrous’ (139). The familiarity in the journey does not negate the dread, and the shared nature of the trip does not mean shared understanding; the narrator had intoned that while in mid-air they ‘both felt something gained or lost, though neither, perhaps, knew which’ (136). Both Markie and Emmeline are part of networks – and travel within networks – but what they see, and what they feel about what they see, are very different indeed, presaging the Liebestod death-drive at the close of the novel (Trotter 2013: 245). Graham Greene’s England Made Me (1935), on the other hand, constructs a narrative that pays homage both to the melancholia of transience and to ephemeral spaces: it does not want a network to enable mutuality or comprehension. It is a bleak fairy tale of twins, brother Anthony and sister Kate, and their entanglements with Krogh, Kate’s lover and boss, a seemingly all-powerful Swedish financier. But it is a novel that works through a rewriting of expectations on both personal and geographical scales, and to do this it relies on the allure of aircraft. For aircraft are a way to be modern, if not overtly modernist. A telling moment comes when a shot duck – a memory from Krogh’s youth – is compared to a broken aeroplane, the artificial form of flight having now become the measure against which the natural is measured (Greene 1970: 39). In the main, though, the aircraft of this novel are non-metaphorical and active. As Fred Hall, Krogh’s thuggish enforcer, travels across the Continent, he is sufficiently blasé about air travel to be lulled into a reverie: He closed his eyes again; he was no longer interested by the flight from Amsterdam; he knew the airports of Europe as well as he had once known stations on the Brighton line – shabby Le Bourget; the great scarlet rectangle of the Tempelhof as one came in from London in the dark, the headlamps lighting up the asphalt way; the white sand blowing up around the shed at Tallinn; Riga, where the Berlin to Leningrad plane came down and bright pink mineral waters were sold in a tinroofed shed. (161) This is Europe remade spatially, with the replacement of national borders by nodes of significance and confident associations – directly analogous to the new model of fraudulent capitalism that Krogh himself practises. Yet this form of modernity itself unsettles the characters: Hall finds aerial commutes ‘a comfortable dull way of travelling’, compared to the tactile pleasures of the past: ‘the weekend jaunt, the whisky and splash, the peroxide blonde’ (161), which he could encounter in the more grounded journeys, with ‘the racing tips from strangers in the Brighton Pullman’ (162), and which did not require a vertiginous visual leap. The thing that seems to unsettle Hall the most is the abstraction that is forced upon him by being up in the air. The ‘great scarlet rectangle’ of Berlin’s Tempelhof airport that he sees below is part of a sequence of patterns and shapes that means the view from above does not reveal objects beneath but rather shows a world of abstracted transience. This is part of Greene’s engagement with something that could be termed the ‘high-sublime’, an idea within the more aerially intoxicated parts of aesthetic modernism that dates back at least to Yeats’s ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ (1918). It is a concept filled with fragile connections and observable gnomic shapes, such as those in Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘Flying over London’, written in the mid-1930s but not published until after the war, where the

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patterns noted by an aestheticising observer allow her to say: ‘we fell into fleeciness, substance and colour; all the colours of pounded plums and dolphins and blankets and seas and rain clouds crushed together’ (Woolf 2008: 210). Toward the end of the essay an attempt is made to fix a point of focus, but the view of London now looks more like an artistic composition than an actual city, and this only acts to destabilise the position of the narrator/observer/pattern-maker. With Greene the aestheticising aspect of this destabilisation wrought by the aerial view is kept in tension with the linguistic: the shapes that the skywriting planes keep writing, in both England Made Me and his The Confidential Agent (1939), begin as puzzling abstractions but eventually resolve into words. Moreover, in the commentary Greene wrote for The Future’s in the Air (1937), a documentary film celebrating the Empire Airmail service, the voiceover dwells on the patterns, ‘draughtboards of fields’ and shadows on water and land, but then resolves into a lyrical hymn of exotic but scribal interconnections: ‘Letters to Indian Civil Servants; letter to the government in New Delhi [. . . ], letters to Chinese scouts, letters to men in rickshaws’ (Greene 2007: 503). The purpose of the aircraft becomes clear – it can (only) connect a mesh – and the purpose – airmail – is always set against the abstraction of what it has to fly over. The publicity department of Imperial Airways commissioned numerous other films along these lines, utilising a rhetoric of network as a way to perceive through technology the bonds holding a more restive empire together (Anthony 2011: 301–21).

War and the Body This chapter has offered alternate modes for thinking about the importance of aeriality in literature if the hawk-bomber paradigm is recontextualised or even temporarily elided in some writings of the 1930s. This manœuvre becomes, obviously, harder to continue in the years of the Second World War itself.7 One route would be to think through the implications of vulnerability and dread that the aircraft brought about for writers on the ground, ranging from the famous, Woolf’s ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air-raid’ (1941), through to those such as Arthur Gwynn-Browne’s FSP (1942). On 27 May 1940 Gwynn-Browne – counter-intelligence officer, motorcyclist and singular stylist – was lying in the sand dunes at Dunkirk. Under bombing, his fears seem almost scripted by Gertrude Stein, a writer whom Gwynn-Browne had long admired. Her patterning of the lived perception of time was now used to recount his predicament: We lay with our faces in the earth sweating [. . .] I remembered thinking I did not feel fear and then wondering if my sweating was not after all just fear. Was it. I was thinking strongly. Time seemed suspended to be standing still. I thought, I will not be killed I will not be killed I will most certainly not be killed like an animal like this in a hole and like this. I said I will not be killed, I will not be killed I have things to do I will not be killed I will not be killed like this I have things to do like this I will not be killed like this I will not be killed like this. (Gwynn-Browne 2002: 120) The vulnerable body under attack, with an asymmetry of power, is a staple of Second World War literature – and can occur in predictable and unpredictable places. Richard Hillary’s celebrated memoir, The Last Enemy (1943), is an account of his pre-war upper-class life and his career as a Spitfire pilot – and, post-crash, his agonising burns

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and extensive hospital treatment. It is part of a genre which situates the body of the fighter-pilot, high above the sludge of the trenches and the industrialised warfare, as the inheritor of a chivalric tradition – notably in the best-selling memoir of Cecil Lewis, Sagittarius Rising (1936), which lauded the pilot, who existed in ‘the only sphere in modern warfare where a man saw his adversary and faced him in mortal combat, the only sphere where there was still chivalry and honour’ (Lewis 2014: 46). Hillary’s version of this credo comes when he explains why he wants to fly: In a fighter plane, I believe, we have found a way to return to war as it ought to be, war which is individual combat between two people in which one either kills or is killed. It’s exciting, it’s individual, and it’s disinterested. I shan’t be sitting behind a long-range gun working out how to kill people sixty miles away. I shan’t get maimed: either I get killed or I shall get a few pleasant putty medals and enjoy being stared at in a night club. (Hillary 1956: 21) Yet, ironically, he did survive, albeit horribly maimed. The ‘proem’ to his book describes the sensations of baling out of his burning aircraft, the smell of burnt flesh and his drifting while waiting for rescue. Months of hospital and skin-grafts followed as a patient of the pioneering plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe. Thus, the teleology of The Last Enemy does not end with the death of the pilot, but rather his re-entry into the world as a scarred and damaged warning, stripped of the insouciance of his class and background. In the closing episode of his narrative, Hillary, caught in an airraid in London, helps to dig out a wounded woman and her dead child. The woman looks up at him and speaks: ‘I see they got you too’ (244). This moment of empathetic connection brings on hysteria in Hillary: It started small, small but insistent deep inside me, sharp as a needle, then welling up uncontrollable, spurting, flowing over, choking me. I was drowning, helpless in a rage that caught and twisted and hurled me on, mouthing in a blind unthinking frenzy. (245) Here the wounded pilot, whose laconic and detached mental state had seemingly survived his bodily abjection and his new carapace, is ultimately broken by connective sympathy. Another remaking of the airman occurs in the later works of John Sommerfield. After a spell fighting in the Spanish Civil War, Sommerfield returned to Britain, became entangled with the Mass Observation Movement and was then conscripted as a member of RAF ground crew before being posted to the Far East. His wartime writings were collected in The Survivors (1947), and their uneven lengths and tone give a structural corollary to their anti-heroic contingency. A memorable scene comes in a piece Sommerfeld wrote for ‘The Way We Live Now’ in Penguin New Writing. Here, as in his ‘Worm’s Eye View’ (1941), he depicts the crushing monotony of life in an aerodrome, but then turns, with reverence, to the main hangers: Here planes are dismantled and overhauled. Little fighters, with fish-shaped bodies, have their sides laid open, disclosing elegant and complex silvery bones. Multicoloured electric cables branch and ramify like a nervous system amongst the bewildering confusion of tightly packed metal entrails. [. . .] Tenderly, intently, surgeons

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operating with spanners, the mechanics replace each reassembled organ into the plane’s body cavities, put back the dural skin, and make ready for the moment of reawakening. The cylinders inhale petrol breaths, the propellers turn, oil circulates through copper arteries, wires are charged with nervous energy, and a powerful creature roars with hungry voice, moves and flies. (The pilot socketed into his tiny cockpit, hands and feet fitted to controls, eyes linked with dials and gauges, seems only the final piece that completes the puzzle). (Sommerfield 1947: 117) After this luscious detailing of materiality being cosseted into a near-corporeal state, the pilot emerges only at the close of the paragraph as a literal afterthought in parentheses; he is bracketed off into a capsule and suborned to the machine. This is a trope with its own long history, but it gets reused repeatedly in the Second World War as aircraft became more sophisticated and the role of the pilot more determined by the technology, as, for example, in one of Roald Dahl’s bleakest short stories, ‘Death of an Old Old Man’ (1946). Such gifting of animism on to machines also shapes some of the most memorable writings by the artist Paul Nash. Famous for his work in the First World War and his interwar negotiations with abstraction and surrealism, he returned to work again as a war artist in 1939–45. But alongside his painting he was writing about his subjectmatter. In ‘The Personality of Planes’, first published in Vogue in 1942, he described why this war was different from the last: ‘I first became interested in the war pictorially when I realised that machines were the real protagonists’ (Nash 1949: 250). The essay then lists the aspects, in the different types of aircraft, which triggered his tendency to ascribe characteristics – and to read characteristics for personalities - such as ‘[t]he Wellington is very human in one way. It is jolly, on the plump side.’ Then the machines become more animalistic than human: ‘A Whitley, as Blake said of a tear, is an intellectual thing, and as obscurely so, perhaps [. . .] it is a queer birdlike creature reminding me of a dove! [. . .] but if it is a dove it is a dove of death’ (256). These creatures are filled with a blind and terrifying death-urge, but they also eclipse the human; this is typified in another essay where Nash saw in a hanger – a ‘lair’ – some ‘huge mammalian carcases of the bombers with their great heads and erect tail-fins. Their steady gaze was as threatening as their jutting maws, but seemingly oblivious’ (Nash 2000: 154). In ‘Aerial Flowers’ (1945) – the most haunting piece, written just before his death – the very possibility of flight itself becomes a way of thinking about, and imagining, death (161). Yet alongside the elision of the human by these newly animated aircraft came a counterpointing tendency. Nash painted extraordinary pictures of air battles, crashed bombers in cornfields and details of pitted fuselages, but his most haunting visual work of the Second World War was of the gigantic dump at Cowley in Oxfordshire, filled with broken carcasses of German planes: Totes Meer (Dead Sea) (1940–1). Nash described his inspiration in the film, Out of Chaos (1944), which was made about the painting: The thing (the salvage dump) looked to me, suddenly, like a great inundating sea. You might feel – under certain circumstances – a moonlight night, for instance, this is a vast tide moving across the fields, the breakers rearing up and crashing on the plain. And then, no, nothing moves, it is not water or even ice, it is something

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static and dead. It is metal piled up, wreckage. It is hundreds and hundreds of flying creatures which invaded these shores (how many Nazi planes have been shot down or otherwise wrecked in this country since they first invaded?). Well, here they are, or some of them. By moonlight, the waning moon, one could swear they began to move and twist and turn as they did in the air. A sort of rigor mortis? No, they are quite dead and still. (Hall 1996: 31) Here the bodies of crashed aircraft have themselves become a landscape, or rather a seascape owing much to Casper David Friedrich’s Romanticism and especially his massive The Sea of Ice (1824). The aircraft have now become a vista akin to the one they once observed, and the form in which it has been rendered is another reuse of German (albeit aesthetic) skill and technology. Nash offers one version of the refiguring of both the airman and the aerial view, a process which, this chapter has shown, occurred across some very different texts. Auden’s double insight in the Orators – that the view from the plane offers a connective way of seeing patterns, both those spread out below and those implicit within culture; and that such vistas affect the body doing the perceiving, especially in ways that language has to struggle to describe – is a truly potent one. But it also belongs to a very historically specific period of the long 1930s – of pre-supersonic flight and of non-pressurised cabins – and one which was decisively ended by the deployment of atomic weapons. Therefore my final text, Constance Babington Smith’s memoir Evidence in Camera: The Story of Photographic Intelligence in World War II (1958), offers a strange farewell to such an era. It was published sufficiently long after the war for the techniques she described to be declassified, many of the people to have died, and the worldview rendered into history by the Cold War. Babington Smith, who went on to become an acclaimed biographer and literary critic, narrated how she became part of a vast, delicate and profoundly frustrating process of discerning meaning: ‘I tried in vain to say something about those wooly-looking photographs. It had been like peering through an overlay of tracing paper - you could see blurred shapes but you couldn’t possibly hint what they were’ (Babbington Smith: 206). This memoir of the evolving nature of photoreconnaissance and interpretation pivots on a sense of unease and estrangement, but not one to be found in the pilots swooping over German territory, nor in the actual camera views from above. But rather – alert, secretive, prone to hunches – it is the solitary young woman in an underground bunker, reading the landscapes with a wary suspicion and a desire for signs, who might prove the inheritor of what Auden diagnosed years earlier. But she is now doing so in artificial light, replete with the nascent technologies of data-mining and aided by primitive computing, gathering multiple copies and comparing them by stereoscopes, presaging a simulacrum of the actual world which might eventually come to pass in the planetary panopticon that is Google Maps.

Notes   1. For a cultural history see Dorian and Pousin (2013).   2. A range of theoretically different but useful ways of thinking about how and why aeriality mattered to interwar British culture include Beer (1996: 149–78), Saint-Amour (2015) and Holman (2014).

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  3.   4.   5.   6.

See Mellor and Salton-Cox (2015: 1–9). For a discussion of the loaded term ‘airmindedness’ see Holman (2014: 1–11). For imagined terrors of the future see Clarke (1992). See, for example, Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography (1937) and Anni Albers’s artworks such as Tapestry (1948).   7. See Francis (2011).

Works Cited Anthony, Scott (2011), ‘The Future’s in the Air: Imperial Airways and the British Documentary Film Movement’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 8, pp. 301–21. Auden, W. H. (1977), The English Auden, Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Faber. Babington Smith, Constance (1958), Evidence in Camera: The Story of Photographic Intelligence in World War II. London: Chatto. Beer, Gillian (1996), ‘The Island and the Aeroplane: The Case of Virginia Woolf’, in Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground: Essays by Gillian Beer. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 149–78. Bowen, Elizabeth (1987), To the North. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Caudwell, Christopher (2015), Death of an Airman. London: British Library. Clarke, I. F. (1992), Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars, 1763–3749. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cunningham, Valentine (1988), British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dorian, Mark and Frederic Pousin, eds (2013), Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture. London: Bloomsbury. Ellmann, Maud (2003), Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Francis, Martin (2011), The Flyer: British Culture and the Royal Air Force, 1939–1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greene, Graham (1935), The Bear Fell Free. London: Grayson and Grayson. Greene, Graham (1970), England Made Me. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Greene, Graham (2007), Mornings in the Dark: The Graham Greene Film Reader, ed. David Parkinson. Manchester: Carcanet. Gwynn-Browne, Arthur (2002), FSP: An NCO’s Description of His and Others’ First Six Months of War, January 1st–June 1st, 1940. Bridgend: Seren. Hall, Charles (1996), Paul Nash: Aerial Creatures. London: Lund Humphries. Hauser, Kitty (2007), Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology & the British Landscape 1927– 1955. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hillary, Richard (1956), The Last Enemy. London: Pan. Holman, Brett (2014), The Next War in the Air: Britain’s Fear of the Bomber, 1908–1941. Farnham: Ashgate. Lewis, Cecil (2014), Sagittarius Rising. New York: Penguin. Lowry, Malcolm (2014), In Ballast to the White Sea, ed. Patrick McCarthy. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Mellor, Leo and Glyn Salton-Cox (2015), ‘Introduction’, Critical Quarterly, 57: 3, Special Issue on the long 1930s, pp. 1–9. Nash, Paul (1949), Outline: An Autobiography and Other Writings. London: Faber. Nash, Paul (2000), Writings on Art, ed. Andrew Causey. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Saint-Amour, Paul (2015), Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Smith, Stan (1994), ‘Remembering Bryden’s Bill: Modernism from Eliot to Auden’, Critical Survey, 6: 3, pp. 312–24. Sommerfield, John (1947), The Survivors. London: J. Lehmann. Sommerfield, John (2010), May Day. London: London Books. Thompson, E. P. (1995), ‘Christopher Caudwell’, Critical Inquiry, 21: 2 (Winter), pp. 305–53. Trotter, David (2013), Literature in the First Media Age: Britain Between the Wars. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. Waugh, Evelyn (2000), Vile Bodies. London: Penguin. Woolf, Virginia (2008), Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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7 Robots: Gendered Machines and Anxious Technophilia Katherine Shingler

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he concept of the robot or humanoid machine has always been closely bound up with notions of sex, gender and reproduction. In Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R., whose 1923 English production first introduced the term ‘robot’ to the English language, the humanoid machines are presented as a ‘sexless throng’ (Čapek 1961: 78). Outwardly gendered along binary lines in order to cater to consumer demand (for ‘female’ domestic servants, notably), they are nevertheless devoid of biological sex and lack sexual desire; indeed, their inability to procreate, to reproduce themselves, is what differentiates them from and makes them dependent on humans. Čapek’s play brings out a number of threats posed by this imagined technology: we see on stage the disastrous consequences that ensue when technology built to serve us escapes our control, when the apparently servile robots begin to think for themselves and overcome their human masters. And yet it is the robots’ disruption of categories of sex and gender that is most central to the play’s apocalyptic scenario, as the very existence of the ‘sexless throng’ mysteriously engenders an epidemic of infertility amongst humans, a phenomenon presented in the play as a kind of ‘punishment’ for humans’ hubristic meddling in nature (41). Although R.U.R was not created under the aegis of any modernist movement or sensibility, I begin with it here principally because it raises a number of intersecting concerns that can be traced through a broader late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury technological imaginary. In its suggestion that the destructive power of machine technology (which finds its ultimate expression in the imagined figure of the robot) lies in its ability to destabilise or undo categories of sex and gender, Čapek’s play evokes the spectre of a ‘civilization without sexes’ – a notion which, as Mary Louise Roberts (1994: 4) has shown, haunted the French cultural imagination during the First World War and its aftermath. Fears about a degenerate technologised society, in which the status quo of sexual relations would be upended, may have been particularly prevalent in France in this period. This was due to a number of factors, including, first, a crisis of masculinity related to the technologies of war, which not only significantly dented the male population but subjected soldiers to psychological disorders disarmingly close in appearance to the ‘female’ disease of hysteria (Showalter 1987: 167–74). A second key factor was the protracted French demographic crisis, which resulted in a renewed emphasis on pronatalism and the nuclear family as the cornerstone of society, and a heightened awareness of the threats posed by the ‘New Woman’, in her various guises as flapper or garçonne, to patriarchal order (Silverman 1989: 63–7; Roberts 1994: 120–47).

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Intersecting fears about degeneracy, gender and technology were also present in other national contexts,1 however, as the international popularity of Čapek’s play suggests. If this chapter focuses particularly on texts and works of art produced in metropolitan France, it does so with one eye on transnational currents, and in full acknowledgement of the fact that the works under consideration circulated within modernism’s transnational networks – and are, in the case of Duchamp’s Large Glass and Picabia’s mechanomorphs, just as heavily imbricated in New York Dada as in the Parisian avant-garde. As such, the disruptions to sex and gender threatened by the imagined figure of the robot, and the ambivalent responses of modernist writers and artists to that figure, are far from a uniquely ‘French’ phenomenon. Čapek may be responsible for popularising the term ‘robot’, but he was certainly not the first to imagine the robot itself. The idea of the automaton or mechanical doll has been around since ancient times, and real automatons proliferated from the mideighteenth century onwards, with industrial manufacture peaking around the 1880s (see Wosk 2015: 34–41). Although both male and female automatons were produced, it is notable that fictional representations tend overwhelmingly to identify such figures as female. Andreas Huyssen explains this in the following terms: [A]s soon as the machine came to be perceived as a demonic, inexplicable threat and as harbinger of chaos and destruction – a view which typically characterizes many 19th-century reactions to the railroad to give but one major example – writers began to imagine the Maschinenmensch as woman. There are grounds to suspect that we are facing here a complex process of projection and displacement. The fears and perceptual anxieties emanating from ever more powerful machines are recast and reconstructed in terms of the male fear of female sexuality, reflecting, in the Freudian account, the male’s castration anxiety. (Huyssen 1986: 70) If the robot itself can be seen to crystallise fears about the changes that technology might inflict upon human life, to engender a vision of the posthuman (well in advance, indeed, of the digital technologies to which the emergence of posthuman theory has sought to respond), and even to envision the possible displacement of the human by the machine, then casting the robot as female allowed authors to give voice to a yet more complex set of anxieties. In particular, it allowed them to assimilate technology to female sexuality and the female body in order to figure it as simultaneously alluring – an object of desire and fascination – and threatening, or potentially ‘castrating’. This set of representational strategies culminates in what Rosi Braidotti, taking her cue from Huyssen, terms the ‘machine vamp’, as exemplified by Fritz Lang’s robot Maria in his 1927 film Metropolis (Braidotti 2013: 106). But the identification of woman and machine also allowed for male fantasies of domination to be exercised, as with the android (or ‘andréide’, in its feminised form) of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s 1886 novel L’Ève future. In Villiers’s science-fiction scenario, the robot-woman Hadaly (whose name means ‘ideal’ in Persian) is designed by a fictionalised version of the inventor Thomas Edison to correspond totally to the desires of his friend Lord Ewald, in a reworking of the Pygmalion myth for the electric age. In creating this machine-woman, Edison attains a god-like creative power – but, as in R.U.R., is ultimately punished for his audacity when Hadaly dies at sea, nature (or divine creation) reclaiming its supremacy over the artificial and the man-made.

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Hadaly is unambiguously feminine, at least in her surface features; and yet her status as female is very much open to question, since she is sterile, unable to reproduce (creative power being afforded only to men in the framework of Villiers’s narrative). In terms of sex, then, she is framed as not-quite-female, and provides a close counterpart to another late nineteenth-century instance of the robot that functions as an emblem of gender trouble. The automaton that appears at the end of Rachilde’s 1884 novel Monsieur Vénus presents as male; yet this gruesome effigy (part-flesh, part-machine, with its transparent rubber skin, and its hair, teeth and fingernails torn from the dead body of the female protagonist’s lover, Jacques) is framed as the culmination of a long series of ‘perverse’ gender inversions. Over the course of the novel, Jacques is progressively emasculated, so that he is eventually reduced to a passive sex doll, moulded to the desires of the cross-dressing Raoule, who has become the dominant, ‘male’ figure. Rachilde’s novel thus presents a kind of playful, wilfully decadent inversion of the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea that would be taken up shortly afterwards by Villiers. Both of these fin-de-siècle texts by Villiers and Rachilde put into play intersecting anxieties about gender and technology. Villiers’s text seeks to counter these anxieties through recourse to Pygmalionesque fantasy, and justifies its own misogyny by appealing to an association between women and the artificial that Villiers clearly holds to be self-evident (Villiers de l’Isle-Adam 1993: 209). Rachilde’s novel, however, is more subversive, playfully unsettling gender categories, yet situating the male-but-female automaton as a more disturbing figure that points to the emasculation to be suffered by men if the emancipated woman incarnated by Raoule gets her way. In this respect, the automaton of Monsieur Vénus looks forward to the close association, as demonstrated by Debora L. Silverman (1989: 67–72), between technology and the New Woman that marked debates about gender around the turn of the century; but it also looks beyond this to the post-war fear of a ‘civilization without sexes’, and, as I shall argue here, to a range of modernist representations of technology that appear to echo this fear. Taking my cue from Alex Goody’s suggestion that ‘the mechanomorphic portraits of New York Dada and their negotiations of gender sit in a tradition that stretches from the late-nineteenth century to the technosphere we presently inhabit’ (Goody 2007: 79), I seek to highlight the continuity between the fin-de-siècle technological imagination and the modernist response to technology as formulated in the period extending from the avant-guerre to roughly 1930. One advantage of placing this continuity in the foreground of our discussion is that it allows us to bring out the critical significance of sex and gender in modernist visions of the robot. It also allows us to underline the deep ambivalence embedded in these visions, and hence to avoid simplistic equations between modernism and the cult of the machine, or straightforward oppositions between a forward-looking modernism and a more inward-looking, reactionary fin de siècle. One might assume modernism to be less fearful, to take a less reactionary attitude towards technology, than the years of Symbolism and Decadence, characterised by a turn away from the psychologically damaging industrial world and towards a cushioned domestic interior. Modernism is commonly held to be characterised by an ‘openness to possible futures’ (Armstrong 2018: 237) and, as Marjorie Perloff has shown, by a literal openness to the sounds, images and textures of the technologised modern city, all of which are incorporated into the work of poets such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars (Perloff 2003: 2–79). From the emphasis in the Blast Manifesto

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on industry and ‘mechanical inventiveness’ (Lewis 1914: 39), to Italian Futurism’s praise of the motorcar as an emblem of modern beauty (Marinetti 1909a: 1), to The Little Review’s professed vision of the machine as ‘the religious expression of today’ (Heap 1925: 22), literary modernism appears to welcome the dawning of the machine age with open arms. We similarly see artists replicating the forms and dynamics of the machine in various works of visual art, from Sonia Delaunay’s ‘prismes électriques’ to Fernand Léger’s engagements with the machine across the domains of painting, film and art theory (Léger 2009: 81–109), and in the many intersections between modernist performance and the mechanical imagination documented by Émilie Morin in this volume. As was the case for Villiers de l’Isle-Adam in the 1880s, part of the appeal of the gendered machine for the male-dominated modernist generation was that it provided a space to exercise fantasies of patriarchal control and domination. This is particularly visible in a short statement by the Franco-American writer Paul Haviland, published on the front page of his friend Alfred Stieglitz’s magazine, 291, in 1915: Man made the machine in his own image. She has limbs which act; lungs which breathe; a heart which beats; a nervous system through which runs electricity. The phonograph is the image of his voice; the camera the image of his eye. The machine is his ‘daughter born without a mother’. That is why he loves her. [. . .] After making the machine in his own image he has made his human ideal machinomorphic. But the machine is yet at a dependent stage. Man gave her every qualification except thought. She submits to his will but he must direct her activities. Without him she remains a wonderful being, but without aim or anatomy. Through their mating they complete one another. She brings forth according to his conceptions. (Haviland 1915) Haviland unambiguously genders machine technology as female, and with the description of the machine as being made ‘in his own image’ (and the human ideal in turn becoming ‘machinomorphic’), it is difficult not to imagine it as taking on a humanoid, specifically female, form. The text thus gestures towards the female robot as an ideal technological creation. The virtual robot-woman of this text is a direct creation of man, made according to his precise specifications, much as Villiers’s Hadaly is made to correspond to Lord Ewald’s desires. The ‘girl born without a mother’ (a concept that, as we shall see, is key to Francis Picabia’s visual representations of the machine-woman) is the direct result of her (male) creator’s will, but also provides a conveniently passive tool or vessel to enable his further creative acts. Through their ‘mating’ (which, while perhaps intended metaphorically, hints at the erotic potential of the robot-woman, as a perennially available love object), she will ‘bring forth according to his conception’, enabling his creativity. As such, and as David Hopkins has argued in relation to Duchamp and Picabia (2008: 81), Haviland’s conception of technology as female seems to create space for fantasies not just of male domination over women but also of male creation qua procreation, the male artistscientist-creator usurping the female role in giving birth and claiming this ultimate act of creation entirely for himself. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s 1909 play Poupées électriques (Electric Dolls) occupies a similar thematic terrain, but projects these fantasies of female robots on to

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women themselves, figuring them as compliant, machine-like bodies animated by ‘electric’ sexual impulses. The robots seen on stage here resemble stuffy bourgeois figures (reminiscent of eighteenth-century automatons in frock coats and wigs) and are not themselves the object of erotic interest, except insofar as they add spice to the sex life of the play’s central couple, who pursue their trysts under the noses of the imperious ‘dolls’. More pertinent, however, is Marinetti’s insistence on the notion of women themselves as machines, such that the inventor of the robots is able to declare his wife a ‘dynamo’ (Marinetti 1909b: 131) and to compare her directly to his automatons, stating that ‘vos mécaniques sont identiques . . . Et c’est toujours l’électricité qui fait vibrer vos nerfs comme des fils bons conducteurs de volupté’ (‘your mechanisms are identical . . . And it’s always electricity that vibrates along your nerves, wires conducting your sexual impulses’) (132). While the play’s conventional romantic storyline sits awkwardly in relation to the emerging Futurist movement, it prefigures the Futurists’ interest in electric technologies, and its conception of woman-as-machine speaks to the movement’s conservative sexual politics. Marinetti and Haviland’s visions of the machine-woman are a long way from the disturbing ‘machine vamp’ figure of Lang’s Metropolis, both of them possessing a sexuality that runs like clockwork and is easily mastered by the male creator/lover, rather than threatening to run out of control. Elsewhere, however, the female robot provides instead a cipher through which a more ambivalent position on machine technology, and the technologised New Woman, may be articulated. To paraphrase Michel Benamou (1980: 71), this position can helpfully be characterised as anxious technophilia, understood as a somewhat paradoxical mode of response which combines excitement, fascination or adulation with a keen awareness of the threats posed by the machine. My attention to the modernist ambivalence towards the machine also bears similarities to Roger Rothman’s account of ‘modernist melancholy and the presence of an anti-modernist nostalgia at the heart of the avant-garde’ (2009: 5–6). I propose to show how this ambivalence, this anxious technophilia, operates across a number of works, both visual and verbal, by Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Marius de Zayas and Guillaume Apollinaire. Marcel Duchamp began to create works of art responding to the machine from 1912, commencing with his Mariée (Bride) (Figure 7.1) and Passage de la vierge à la mariée (Passage from Virgin to Bride). His Nu descendant un escalier, no. 2 (1912, Figure 11.7) also arguably represents a robotic form – albeit a distinctly ungendered one. However, by far Duchamp’s best-known intervention in machine aesthetics (indeed, perhaps the best-known avant-garde take on the machine and its gendered implications) is his Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even), often referred to simply as The Large Glass, created between 1915 and 1923, a period corresponding roughly with his close friend Picabia’s engagement with the machine. Inspiration for this mechanical turn in both Duchamp and Picabia’s work derived from a number of sources which have been painstakingly excavated by scholars (Hopkins 2008: 76; Camfield 1966: 311; Borràs 1985: 153–4). Our concern here, however, is not to uncover such points of origin, but rather to examine how Duchamp and Picabia articulated ambivalent responses to machine technology through the figure of the robot-woman. Duchamp’s 1912 Bride is formed of a group of overlapping and interlinked tubes, vessels and levers. Some of the vessels are suggestively uterine in form, the tubes perhaps fallopian; the more delicate strings and levers suggest muscular tendons or connective

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Figure 7.1  Marcel Duchamp, Mariée (Bride), 1912. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950. © Photo SCALA, Florence. © Succession Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021. / © Jacques Villon / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London.

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tissue. The palette is restricted to a relatively narrow range of oxidised browns and fleshy pinks. This is, then, a machine-body, a cyborg form, and yet it is also amorphous, without defining contours, without ‘skin’. What we are looking at, it seems, is the interior of the Bride’s body: it is the Bride flayed, her inner workings exposed to the spectator’s gaze, much like Hadaly’s anatomy which is stripped bare for the benefit of the male spectator Lord Ewald, in the lengthy dissection scenes of L’Ève future (Villiers de l’Isle-Adam 1993: 213–69). If the machine-woman’s status as ‘bride’ inevitably suggests her potential as love object and/or sex object (just as the title of the contemporary, very similar painting, Passage from Virgin to Bride, evokes her deflowering), this is taken yet further in Duchamp’s The Large Glass (Figure 7.2).2 The Large Glass is essentially a window split into two panes, the upper of which is occupied by the ‘Bride’ or female form, while the lower is occupied by the male forms of multiple ‘Bachelors’. As suggested by the title, the Bride is ‘stripped bare’ by the Bachelors, her body exposed to their (and our) gazes. This body is, if anything, even more amorphous than the 1912 Brides, although the forms at the left of the top panel directly recall the connecting vessels and levers of those earlier paintings. The main part of the bride, however, which extends across the top of the work, is a sort of cloud-like, pinkish, fleshy form, with three blank panels at its centre: a looming absence or lack at the centre of the female body; in Duchamp’s notes for the work, these are described as ‘pistons’ or ‘nets’ (1973: 36). The very solidity of this ‘flesh’ is open to question, its cloud-like shape suggesting gaseous emissions, perhaps fumes from the ‘love gasoline’ that the Bride, according to Duchamp’s notes, is supposed to hold in her reservoir (Duchamp 1973: 42–3). If she is conceived by Duchamp as a sort of love machine, however, her purpose is surely frustrated, as there is no contact between her and the ‘Bachelors’ below. These ‘Bachelor’ forms, ‘malic moulds’ that seem hard but nevertheless hollow, are connected by an intricate wired mechanism to a form that resembles a water wheel (without water to turn it), and in turn to a schematic chocolate grinder.3 The Bachelor machine, then, might turn and grind – although, as with most of Picabia’s mechanomorphs of the same period, it is not clear how, or what powers it, exactly – but its movement is independent of the isolated Bride. If this work presents an ‘erotics of the machine’ (Grenville 2001: 19), it is first and foremost masturbatory, a bleak (if somewhat humorous) emptying-out of sexual relations in favour of purely mechanical actions; a vision of a machine-people which appears to maintain some sort of notion of biological sex and yet blocks meaningful bodily contact across the glass’s central, gendered divide. While this is a hermetic work, and it certainly cannot be reduced to a single stable meaning, what is reasonably clear is that it reflects broader cultural anxieties about the impact of the machine on human culture, and in particular the notion that machine technology stands as a threat to biological sex and to sexual reproduction. The fact that the work contains traces of these anxieties should not, however, be taken to imply that Duchamp’s discourse is itself fundamentally conservative or that it constitutes an implicit plea for the re-establishment of reassuring binary categories of sex and gender; indeed, the artist’s gender-bending performances elsewhere in his work (via his female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy) rather suggest a more amused, playful stance in relation to these issues. Francis Picabia’s own erotics of the machine, and his generation of a discourse on the figure of the ‘New Woman’, are perhaps most easily visible in two works, Portrait d’une jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité (Portrait of a Young American Girl in

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Figure 7.2  Marcel Duchamp, La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (The Large Glass), 1915–23. Philadelphia Museum of Art, bequest of Katherine S. Dreier, 1952. © Photo SCALA, Florence. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021.

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Figure 7.3  Francis Picabia, Jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité, 291, 5–6 (July–August 1915), p. 4. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021. a State of Nudity; 1915, Figure 7.3) and Américaine (American Woman; 1917).4 The first of these is a simple, clean-lined drawing of a spark plug, reminiscent of technical drawings and diagrams. Here, the nude female body of the title is supplanted by and assimilated to a machine (or not even that: the girl is rather rendered here as a machine part, dependent on her contact with other parts, with a larger ‘body’ of connections, to function). Soft, yielding female flesh is replaced, then, with hard metallic contours. The branding of this machine-body with the word ‘FOR-EVER’ seems both to appropriate the slogans of modern advertising and to suggest a romantic promise that veers into a sexual joke: the girl in question, whose desires are implicitly likened to electrical charges, can be counted on to ‘go’ forever. (Indeed, the French for spark plug, ‘bougie d’allumage’, itself contains a host of sexual innuendos, with ‘allumer’ meaning ‘to turn on’, while the related term ‘allumeuse’ suggests a flirt or prick tease.) It is significant, too, that the machine-girl presented here is American, and not just because Picabia was particularly inspired by the machine cultures he encountered in New York on his visits in 1913 and 1915–17, as he indeed stated in an oft-quoted article (Anon. 1915: 2). Rather, the American girl is attractive because she was held to be more liberal in outlook than her French counterpart: less bound by the strictures of marriage, more open to extra-marital affairs, and hence more available to the artist-lover. This is reflected in the 1917 Américaine, a representation of a light-bulb whose electrical capacity to ‘turn on’ is again understood, and is echoed in the reflected words ‘flirt’ and ‘divorce’. This type of assimilation of woman to machine might seem to be a somewhat crass celebration of the New Woman’s liberated sexuality, along the lines of Marinetti’s vision of woman as electrically charged ‘doll’. Elsewhere, however, Picabia’s engagement with

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the figure of the machine-woman is rather more complex, and more anxious. Across a large body of work produced from 1915 onwards, Picabia envisages a range of different figures of the robot: ‘mechanomorphs’ or machine-portraits, often naming friends and acquaintances as the subject but replacing the human body with the machine; ambiguous confrontations between the human body and machine parts, very often presented as female or as an ambiguous combination of interacting male and female characteristics. It is impossible to make sweeping statements about the meaning of this varied body of work; I intend to examine only a couple of examples that I consider representative of Picabia’s anxious technophilia. One of the running themes across Picabia’s mechanomorphic output – indeed, the title that Picabia most often applied to these works – is the ‘Fille née sans mère’ (‘Girl born without a mother’). As George Baker has noted, Picabia derived this notion from the index of Latin phrases contained in the Larousse dictionary – as he did for many of his polyvalent, punning titles. And yet the original Latin phrase is ‘Prolem sine matre creatam’, or ‘child born without a mother’: Picabia deliberately feminises it (Baker 2007: 281). The phrase suggests, first, the way in which an imagined robot-people would be ‘born’ not of human procreation and of the female body, but of pure (male) technological creativity, as in Haviland’s very similar formulation, discussed above. The pointed feminisation of the phrase also gestures towards the possibility of the ‘fille’ herself as not-fully-feminine and not-fully-female: since woman did not bear her, the implication is that she too lacks the means of sexual reproduction. Like Hadaly, then, the ‘fille née sans mère’ is sterile. This sterility – indeed the impossibility of meaningful intercourse with the robot-woman – is reflected in the very first of Picabia’s mechanomorphs, published in 291 in June 1915 (Figure 7.4).

Figure 7.4  Francis Picabia, Fille née sans mère, 291, 4 (June 1915), p. 2. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021.

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The rounded forms of this drawing, towards the upper right of the page, suggest female flesh: breasts, buttocks, perhaps an eye; the delicate shading might even indicate coyly blushing cheeks. Towards the left of the image, however, we see harder forms, metallic connecting levers which perhaps recall the ambiguously interconnecting parts of Duchamp’s 1912 Brides. Beneath these are coiled springs, suggesting the back-and-forth movement of parts. A connecting part (a string or wire) on the far left remains incomplete, leading us to ask who or what causes the machine’s movement: what, if anything, ‘turns it on’? In the lower portion of the image, we see an apparent downpipe, a conduit for waste. If this is indeed a female body, then it would appear to be one reduced to its basic sexual and digestive functions; and even then, it is not clear how this body works. It is not clear, especially, whether it is a body waiting to be fucked or a machine that fucks itself. How and where does the (male) spectator gain access? Despite the invitingly rounded forms seen in the upper right of the image, this is not an enticingly sexualised robot-woman, much less a scurrilous joke, as in the two ‘American girls’ discussed above. It is not an ‘open’ body, or a body ready for penetration like Duchamp’s Brides. It is, instead, an altogether more disturbing vision: a ‘machine-vamp’ whose sexuality disturbs because it is so confused, because it is situated beyond binaries of sex and gender. This avoidance of binaries is also present in Picabia’s ‘Voilà ELLE’ (Figure 7.5), in spite of the title which seems to indicate an unambiguously female body. The most prominent form here is the dark, phallic ‘gun’ that seems poised to shoot at a target at the upper right of the image. Both of these elements are connected to a

Figure 7.5  Francis Picabia, Voilà ELLE, 291, 9 (November 1915), p. 3. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021.

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trigger mechanism which seems simultaneously to hold the target open and to start the action again. Behind this contraption, there is a central chamber with pipes connected to it, carrying air perhaps. The lower pipe connects in turn to what appears to be a microscope, its viewfinder trained on the word ‘ELLE’ directly below: woman, then, is to be seen, to be examined, and is conceived as the passive ‘target’ of male attention. At the same time, the image as a whole suggests a ‘hardened, masculinized’ woman, along the lines suggested by Caroline Jones (1998: 153): she is ‘public, phallic’. As figures of the ‘New Woman’ go, this particular example seems to foreground her self-containment, the fact that she seems to ‘go’ by herself. The spectator is once again left forlorn, confused and deprived of points of penetration. That ‘Voilà ELLE’ does indeed represent an implicit portrait of the ‘New Woman’ is suggested by Marius de Zayas’s visual poem ‘Elle’, which was placed on a facing page in 291 (Figure 7.6). The lines positioned at the top left of the page, ‘Femme! Tu voudrais bien te lire dans ce portrait’ (‘Woman! You’ll willingly see yourself in this portrait’), address the poem directly to the modern female reader (the sort of forwardlooking woman, presumably, who would have read a magazine like 291). De Zayas also refers, notably, to the fact that the woman in question ‘n’a pas la peur du plaisir’ (‘has no fear of pleasure’), and to the ‘absence absolue de cilice’ (‘absolute absence of cilice’ – that is, a penitential hair shirt), suggesting that she refuses to repent for her pleasures. Elsewhere in the poem he depicts her as driven by sexual pleasure, a willing slave to ‘jouissance’. Unlike in Picabia’s ‘Américaine’ images, which seem to celebrate a liberated female sexuality, de Zayas peppers his portrait with critical judgements,

Figure 7.6.  Marius de Zayas, ‘Elle’, 291, 9 (November 1915), p. 2.

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noting that the woman in question is brainless, a pure, unthinking mechanism: ‘pas d’intellect/ualisme’ (‘no intellect/ualism’), he declares, following this with the notion of ‘atrophie cérébrale causée par matérialité pure’ (‘cerebral atrophy caused by pure materiality’). She is, moreover, more machine than human, the curved forms suggestive of the female body ironically being constituted by the words ‘une ligne droite tracée par une main mécanique’ (‘a straight line traced by a mechanical hand’). The robotwoman of de Zayas’s poem is, then, an artificial, mechanical ‘fille née sans mère’. If this robot-woman is no more than an unthinking sex machine, this is no fantasy: it is, instead, a searing critique of the ‘New Woman’, rendered terrifying not just because her desires are seen to run out of control but through her association with the machine, itself situated beyond the province of patriarchal authority. Despite Baker’s objections to feminist readings of Picabia’s mechanomorphs (objections presented without either citing or engaging with the scholars who have presented these readings), it seems impossible to deny the fundamental misogyny that underlies both de Zayas’s poem and Picabia’s visual response to it (Baker 2007: 258, 437). That both de Zayas’s poem and Picabia’s images proceed from an anxiety about the threats posed by the figure of the ‘New Woman’ is also suggested by the handwritten text included in the poem: a plaintive ‘Mais je vous aime et vous devez bien m’aimer, un peu’ (‘But I love you and you must love me, a little’), a plea to the wayward, uncontrollable technologised woman to love the male poet-artist back, to return his affections, to allow patriarchal order to be restored. This anxious response to the machine-woman thus contains the reassuring possibility that the threat may be contained, the machine-vamp placed back under male control. Guillaume Apollinaire, of course, occupied a central position in the same Parisian avant-garde networks as Duchamp and Picabia. He wrote about both artists in his 1913 critical text Méditations esthétiques: les peintres cubistes, and they in turn responded to his work, Duchamp via his 1917 collage Apolinère Enameled, and Picabia via a 1918 mechanomorphic portrait.5 What I argue here is that, despite a well-known conservative turn in Apollinaire’s writing (associated with a broader cultural ‘rappel à l’ordre’, or ‘return to order’, bound up in the war and a will to take refuge in classical and specifically French aesthetic traditions), he shares with Duchamp and Picabia an ambivalent position with regard to machine technology, which he expresses through the figure of the robot-woman in his poem ‘1909’. First published in Apollinaire’s collection Alcools in 1913, ‘1909’ (Apollinaire 1965b: 138–9), in its final version, contains lines from another poem, ‘Vendémiaire’, dating from 1909, and so is believed to have been composed in that year (Décaudin 1996: 210). Technological accomplishments such as Blériot’s first cross-Channel flight captured the public imagination in 1909, and it is difficult to ignore a possible connection with Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of the same year. This connection is especially evident in the Manifesto’s displacement of the Victory of Samothrace, as a much-fêted classical representation of feminine beauty, with the sharp machine forms of the modern automobile, which finds a direct echo in Apollinaire’s vision of a delicate feminine beauty absorbed into the alluring yet disturbing figure of the robot-woman. The first stanza of ‘1909’ consists of a portrait of a woman showcasing the fashions of 1909, which were dominated by purple and mauve fabrics, and tunic-style dresses with loose panels (Bohn 2017: 91). The poet goes on to focus on the woman’s face, which, we are told, has the colours of France, implying that the woman embodies a

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singularly French femininity, and perhaps bringing to mind Marianne as archetype. The image of a ‘tricolore’ face is initially jarring, the woman’s highly fashionable and conventional beauty (not to mention her status as a well to-do ‘lady’) being undercut here by a hint at her unnaturalness, her monstrousness. Apollinaire undoes this initial impression of shock by explaining that the woman’s eyes are blue, her teeth white and her lips red; but the jarring effect perhaps stays with the reader and looks forward to the disturbing elision between the delicate ‘lady’ and the unnatural machine-women who appear later in the poem. Apollinaire then describes, in the third stanza, a display of female flesh: his gaze settles on the woman’s plunging neckline, her bare arms, and her hairstyle which is reminiscent of that of Juliette Récamier. The latter was the most prominent society beauty of the Napoleonic era, and Apollinaire’s reference to her necessarily brings to mind the well-known portraits by Jacques-Louis David (1800) and François Gérard (1805), which themselves privilege the coy exposure of flesh: the arms, the décolleté, the neckline exposed to the gaze by the signature piled-up hair. This seems, then, to be a model of femininity that looks back to the ideals of a hundred years previously – although the piled-up Récamier hairstyle might also refer to the Gibson Girl up-do that was fashionable in the years running up to the First World War (and came, of course, from America, which, as we have seen in Picabia’s slightly later mechanomorphs, was associated with a particular understanding of the New Woman as sexually liberated). This is a woman, then, who is simultaneously of the moment and yet looks back to the past; her flesh is very much on display and yet inaccessible to the poet who lusts after her, but laments, ‘She was so beautiful/You wouldn’t have dared love her.’ All of this reflects, I contend, the desire and confusion generated by the emerging figure of the New Woman. Towards the end of the poem, Apollinaire’s gaze seems to turn away from this woman, to focus instead on the very new, exciting and yet anxiety-provoking technological forms of modernity: J’aimais les femmes atroces dans les quartiers énormes Où naissaient chaque jour quelques êtres nouveaux Le fer était leur sang la flamme leur cerveau J’aimais j’aimais le peuple habile des machines Le luxe et la beauté ne sont que son écume Cette femme était si belle Qu’elle me faisait peur (Apollinaire 1965b: 138–9) I loved atrocious women from crowded districts Where each day a few new beings were born Iron was their blood flame their brains I loved I loved the clever tribe of machines Luxury and beauty are merely their spume That woman was so beautiful That she frightened me6 Here, Apollinaire tells of a terrifying breed of women, of ‘new beings’ made of iron and flame, belonging to the ‘clever tribe of machines’. Willard Bohn has read this

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final stanza as referring straightforwardly to working-class women, translating ‘peuple habile des machines’ as ‘people skilled with machines’ (Bohn 2017: 96). In doing so, his reading overlooks the poem’s futuristic vision, and the fact that this is a description of a new kind of ‘being’, of a metallic robot-people. Moreover, Bohn argues for a straight contrast between the fashionable woman, whom he sees Apollinaire as ridiculing, and the ‘femmes atroces’, whom Bohn claims Apollinaire prefers ‘because they are more down to earth’ (2017: 96). It is, of course, possible that the characterisation of luxury and beauty as frothy ‘spume’ on the surface of a more earthy machine culture does imply a ridicule of the woman in the first part of the poem. However, the way in which the final stanza returns suddenly to the singular figure of the woman from earlier in the poem, and to the fear she provokes, suggests an elision between the two figures of femininity that are deployed here. As Clive Scott has argued, the woman of the first part of the poem absorbs the present of the industrial city, is in fact created by it; the lines of the ‘femmes atroces’ and the ‘peuple habile des machines’ are as it were enveloped by the beauty of the woman [. . .] and her transformation from ‘dame’ to ‘femme’ is dependent upon her coming into contact with her industrial counterparts. (Scott 2014: 143) The fashionable, delicate beauty of the first part of the poem does not so much stand in opposition to the robot-women of the last stanza, as morph into one of them. She is no longer warm, yielding flesh but something else, a melding of human and machine that delights the poet, and yet ‘frightens’ him too. The poem thus reflects what may be cast as a broader ambivalence towards machine technology in Apollinaire’s work. Apollinaire insists that poetry should ‘machiner le monde’ – manipulate or reconfigure the world through machine technology – in the same way that science has done (Apollinaire 1991: 954). And yet this technophilia can be seen to sit alongside more disturbing images of chewed-up, fragmented human bodies as figures of a subjectivity whose integrity is threatened by the machine, as in the headless mannequins and detachable hands of the poem ‘L’Émigrant de Landor Road’, for instance (Apollinaire 1965b: 105–6). As in Duchamp, Picabia and de Zayas, Apollinaire chooses to figure this ambivalence in ‘1909’ through the robotwoman, and the dual desire and terror that she provokes. It is worth emphasising that the anxious technophilia evoked through the robotwomen examined in this chapter is not intended to be understood as the sole modernist response to machine technology, but rather as a useful pattern or conceptual framework against which other works might be judged. It is also worth emphasising that this anxious technophilia remains distinct from the fundamentally reactionary view of conservative commentators such as Georges Duhamel, who objects to an encroaching cult of the machine that he associates with American imperialism, and who envisions a future in which the working classes become part of a ‘sexless’, robotic ‘human machine’ (1931: 196–7). Insofar as the various imagined robot-women examined here also query stable notions of sex and gender, gesture towards new iterations of femininity, and simultaneously awaken and deny male desire, they register a similar set of anxieties about the rise of machine technology and its association with the emergence of the ‘New Woman’. And yet there is still a certain excitement, a certain technophilic urge,

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in these modernist works: an openness to technology, as suggested earlier, rather than a reactionary turning away. We remain some way off, nevertheless, from the posthuman as it is envisioned, in celebratory terms, by Donna Haraway (1991): a liberatory movement beyond binaries of male and female, of human and machine, of warm ‘meat’ and cold machine parts. Despite modernist artists and writers’ interest in such posthuman futures, it appears that they cannot help but look to these, through their robot-women, with some degree of trepidation and fear.

Notes   1. See, for instance, Maclaren’s (2012: 2) suggestion that ‘reproduction was a key site for many of those debating the merits of the modern mechanised world’ in the interwar period in Britain.  2. Marcel Duchamp, Passage de la vierge à la mariée (1912), Museum of Modern Art, New York, available at: (last accessed 12 February 2020).   3. The chocolate grinder was itself the subject of two works of 1913–14, both in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art: see and (last accessed 12 February 2020).   4. Francis Picabia, Américaine, 391, no. 6, July 1917, cover. See (last accessed 13 February 2020).  5. Marcel Duchamp, Apolinère Enameled (1917), Philadelphia Museum of Art, available at: ; Francis Picabia, Portrait d’Apollinaire (irritable poète) (1918–19), collection Natalie et Léon Seroussi, available at: (last accessed 12 February 2020).   6. The translation is adapted from Anne Hyde Greet’s version, in Apollinaire (1965a: 183–5).

Works Cited Anonymous (1915), ‘French Artists Spur on an American Art’, New York Tribune, 24 October, part IV: pp. 2–3. Apollinaire, Guillaume (1965a), Alcools, trans. Anne Hyde Greet. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Apollinaire, Guillaume (1965b), Œuvres poétiques, ed. Marcel Adéma and Michel Décaudin. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Apollinaire, Guillaume (1991), Œuvres en prose complètes, vol. II, ed. Pierre Caizergues and Michel Décaudin. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Armstrong, Tim (2018), ‘Modernism, Technology, and the Life Sciences’, in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science, ed. Steven Meyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 223–41. Baker, George (2007), The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Benamou, Michel (1980), ‘Notes on the Technological Imagination’, in The Technological Imagination: Theories and Fictions, ed. Teresa de Lauretis, Andreas Huyssen and Kathleen Woodward. Madison, WI: Coda Press, pp. 65–75. Bohn, Willard (2017), Reading Apollinaire’s ‘Alcools’. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Borràs, Maria Lluïsa (1985), Picabia. London: Thames and Hudson. Braidotti, Rosi (2013), The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Camfield, William A. (1966), ‘The Machinist Style of Francis Picabia’, Art Bulletin, 48: 3–4, pp. 309–22. Čapek, Karel (1961), R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), in R.U.R and The Insect Play, by The Brothers Čapek. London: Oxford University Press. Décaudin, Michel (1996), Le Dossier d’‘Alcools’, 3rd edn. Geneva: Droz/Paris: Minard. Duchamp, Marcel (1973), Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Marchand du Sel), ed. Michael Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson. New York: Oxford University Press. Duhamel, Georges (1931), America the Menace: Scenes from the Life of the Future, trans. Charles Miner Thompson. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin. Goody, Alex (2007), ‘Cyborgs, Women and New York Dada’, The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1915–1945, 3: 1, pp. 79–100. Grenville, Bruce (2001), ‘The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture’, in The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture, ed. Bruce Grenville. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery/ Arsenal Pulp Press, pp. 13–48. Haraway, Donna (1991), ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, pp. 149–81. Haviland, Paul (1915), ‘We are Living in the Age of the Machine’, 291, 7–8 (September–October), n.p. Heap, Jane (1925), ‘Machine-Age Exposition’, The Little Review, Spring, pp. 22–4. Hopkins, David (2008), ‘Male Poetics’, in Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia, exhibition catalogue, ed. Jennifer Mundy. London: Tate, pp. 76–87. Huyssen, Andreas (1986), ‘The Vamp and the Machine: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis’, in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 65–81. Jones, Caroline A. (1998), ‘The Sex of the Machine: Mechanomorphic Art, New Women, and Francis Picabia’s Neurasthenic Cure’, in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 145–80. Léger, Fernand (2009), Fonctions de la peinture. Paris: Gallimard. Lewis, Wyndham (1914), ‘Manifesto I’ and ‘Manifesto II’, Blast, 1, pp. 11–43. Maclaren, Angus (2012), Reproduction by Design: Sex, Robots, Trees, and Test-Tube Babies in Interwar Britain. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Marinetti, F. T. (1909a), ‘Le Futurisme’, Le Figaro, 20 February, p. 1. Marinetti, F. T. (1909b), Poupées électriques. Paris: E. Sansot. Perloff, Marjorie (2003), The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, 2nd edn. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Rachilde (1977), Monsieur Vénus. Paris: Flammarion. Roberts, Mary Louise (1994), Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Rothman, Roger (2009), ‘Modernist Melancholy: Guillaume Apollinaire and Francis Picabia after 1912’, French Cultural Studies, 20: 1, pp. 5–26. Scott, Clive (2014), Translating Apollinaire. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Showalter, Elaine (1987), The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980. London: Virago. Silverman, Debora L. (1989), Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style. Berkeley: University of California Press. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Auguste de (1993), L’Ève future, ed. Alan Raitt. Paris: Gallimard. Wosk, Julie (2015), My Fair Ladies: Female Robots, Androids, and Other Artificial Eves. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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8 Materials: Glass, Iron and Ghostly Fabric David Trotter

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seful matter’ is the definition the materials scientist Christopher Hall proposes of the topic of this chapter. According to Hall, materials should, in the first instance, be taken to include obvious ‘engineering stuff’ such as steel, concrete, rubber, plastics, wood, glass and aluminium. But the term also extends to oil, gas, foodstuffs, agrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, explosives and textiles, as well as ‘oddball things like ivory and invar, graphite, grease, porcelain, and paint’. All these substances have an evident use (Hall 2014: xiii). My concern here is with the representation of useful matter in modernist writing. What might the representation of useful matter tell us about the distinctiveness of literary modernism? What might literary modernism tell us about the distinctiveness of the uses to which particular materials were put in cultures undergoing widespread economic, social and technological transformation? Useful matter has customarily been examined with the aid of the concept of ‘material culture’, which has over the last thirty years or so shaped a wide range of enquiries in the arts, humanities and social sciences. In archaeology and socio-cultural anthropology, where the concept first took hold, the focus has remained on the object or thing: that is to say, more often than not, on the artefact. People make things, things make people (Miller 2010: 42–78). Much the same could be said of highly informative studies of modernist material culture from Douglas Mao’s Solid Objects (1998) to Juli Highfill’s Modernism and its Merchandise (2014) and beyond. There, too, the artefact is key. But what about the materials out of which the things are made that make people? Hall rightly reminds us that, with some notable exceptions such as ceramics, manufacture has, for the most part, been a two-step process: making the material, making the artefact. A ship is made of steel, a garment of fabric: someone makes the steel or the fabric; someone else acquires it and makes a ship, or a garment. The two steps create a division of labour and skills, between ironmaster and shipwright, weaver and garment-maker (Hall 2014: 83). It is not self-evident how research into representations of that first step in the process of manufacture might further the enduring ambition of material cultural studies to ‘connect people and things’ (Deetz 1967: 138). To be sure, some modernist writers took an interest in the ways in which either decay or the circumstances in which it is used might expose an artefact’s materiality. Bill Brown’s careful distinction between the concepts of ‘object’ and ‘thing’ enables him to locate Virginia Woolf’s short story ‘Solid Objects’ (1920) within a ‘continuum of modernist attention to materials’ (Brown 2015: 60). By Brown’s account, the protagonist’s

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encounter with material fragments – pieces of glass, china and iron – ‘bears witness’ not only to the genealogies of avant-garde aesthetic theory, but to crises resulting from the wartime scarcity of basic materials and the post-war flood of cheap imports of iron and glass in particular (56). Freed from their incorporation into the ‘familiar object world’, these fragments assume ‘lives of their own’ (59), a ‘thingness’ at once ‘intimate’ and ‘unassimilated’ (65). Or we might want to ask why D. H. Lawrence should bother to mention that Connie Chatterley, having dined with her husband, and roundly condemned him in her own mind as a dead fish of a gentleman, has put on ‘rubber tennis-shoes’ before slipping out of the house to spend the night in the gamekeeper’s cottage (2006: 195). One possible answer is that British rubber growers, alarmed by an apparently irreversible fall in the price of the raw material, had spent much of the 1920s promoting new uses for it, such as the soles of sports shoes. Crepe rubber, in particular, proved ideal for the purpose, since the proportion of raw material to added minerals (sulphur) in any commodity made from it was very high indeed. A rubber-soled tennis shoe thus combined nature with culture, the raw with the cooked, ancient energies with ultramodern refinement. In a later chapter, after Connie and Mellors have met at the hut in the forest in which they first made love, she dances naked in the rain: ‘She slipped on her rubber shoes and ran out with a wild little laugh’ (221). Those ancient–modern rubber shoes have immunised her against too much wildness as well as too little (Trotter 2013: 89–107). In ‘Solid Objects’, however, as Brown admits, it is not ‘material as such’ but the ‘whole process’ of the retrieval and reanimation of fragments of iron, glass and china that sustains the protagonist’s interest, and the reader’s (2015: 70). Material as such could be said to inform the view we are encouraged to take of Connie Chatterley. But many readers will have noted Connie’s tennis shoes without pausing to reflect on the fact that they are made out of rubber. It seems fair to say that criticism has not yet found a way to define the formal and thematic implications for our understanding of a text of the representation within it, either fleetingly or at length, of material(s) as such. This chapter constitutes a step in that direction. Its primary aim is to explore the as yet unidentified formal and thematic resonance of two materials in particular, iron and glass, in a range of texts from the era of high modernism. While there are exemplary cultural histories of modern materials such as concrete (Forty 2012), they tend to have little to say about literature, which, unlike architecture or the visual arts, cannot really be said to involve the shaping or manipulation of a substance. A writer’s ‘materials’ are their subject-matter, not pen and paper. The methods I will propose for the study of the representation of materials as such in modernism owe less to the study of material culture than they do to two more recent initiatives: the study of the relation of literature to science (Beer 1996, Whitworth 2001, Morrisson 2017, Saunders 2019), and the study of sound in literature (Murphet et al. 2017). I conclude on a ghostly note because I suspect that materiality of a less tangible kind will continue to force itself on our attention. We are used to the idea that the rapid development of X-ray technology during the early years of the twentieth century provided not only a topic (and a spectacle) of widespread public interest, but an opportunity for modernist writers (Danius 2002: 55–90, Garrington 2013: 92–7). The body’s skeletal structure had finally been laid bare, the barrier between its inner and outer spaces breached. What may now merit further consideration is the fact that the same thing was about to happen to

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substances even more solid-seeming than human flesh. For the application of X-ray technology transformed the science of materials. In experiments conducted in 1912, Max von Laue and his colleagues at the University of Munich found that a beam of X-rays passing through a crystal of copper sulphate would diffract so as to create a pattern of discrete spots on a photographic plate. William and Lawrence Bragg, at the University of Cambridge, devised a method for the analysis of these patterns. A wide variety of materials could be shown to consist of a regular ‘spatial lattice’ of atoms, ions and molecules. X-ray diffraction made a detailed knowledge of the crystal structure of metals, ceramics and minerals readily available. It soon became apparent that polymer materials such as wool, silk and cellulose also formed crystals (Hall 2014: 25–6). Cultural historians have yet to describe these dramatic advances in detail. But even the most perfunctory of thumbnail sketches might indicate the scope thus created for a distinctively modernist understanding of materiality as spatial lattice. Nobody was about to underestimate the significance of X-ray diffraction. In March 1920, the University of Cambridge announced the funding of a chair in the science of radiology, or ‘radiometallography’, which afforded ‘great possibilities for examining the internal structure of metals and other materials’. According to the chair’s distinguished sponsors, these possibilities had already begun to transform a range of projects from aircraft design to the manufacture of glass, steel and explosives (‘X-ray Research’ 1920: 13). In September 1923, the Times reported enthusiastically on a gathering of eminent physicists and chemists for the purpose of ‘a joint discussion on cohesion and molecular forces’. Contributors included Oliver Lodge, Ernest Rutherford and William Bragg. The metallurgist Walter Rosenhain spoke of the distortion produced in the lattice of single atoms in a substance by the introduction into it, as in metallic alloys, of atoms from another element: In such alloys, when the interspaces of the atoms of the two metals were closely similar, the result was a solid solution; but when the interspaces differed, the result was a chemical compound. When stress was applied, the crystals slipped along certain definite planes of weaker attachment, and the process of hardening metals was in reality a process of reducing the facility for slip. (‘Molecular Forces’ 1923: 6) The cohesion of a material like iron, hitherto evident enough to lay perception, and when necessary subjected to more strenuous mechanical testing by the engineer, had been shown to depend on the interaction of molecular forces within it: on the meshing of lattices, on slippage along planes of weak attachment. The problem, as The Times explained in December 1925, with reference to Bragg’s recent Romanes Lecture at Oxford, was that the term ‘solid’, unlike ‘gaseous’ and ‘liquid’, describes ‘qualities which are in a sense accidental’: ‘X-ray photography shows the true solid, or crystalline state, as marked off from all other states of matter by a definite orientation, an arrangement of the molecules with respect to each other’ (‘Progress’ 1925: 7). Solidity was henceforth to be understood as a function of a material’s internal structure, or spatial lattice. Not all seeming solids revealed such lattices, however. I begin my account of literary modernism’s interest in materials with glass because the new science had sought in vain for any evidence of internal structure in it.

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Glass Glass, a combination of sand and other minerals fused at a high temperature, fulfils a variety of functions, from intricately wrought decorative object to ubiquitous feature of the built environment. Glass manufacture was an ancient technology and its products have exerted a powerful fascination in many cultures since (at least) the early modern period (Garrison 2015). Isobel Armstrong has shown that, during the nineteenth century, dramatic advances in the quality and quantity of the material produced led to the creation of an ‘environment of mass transparency’ and a corresponding ‘glass consciousness’ (2008: 1). Glass, Armstrong proposes, ‘became a third or middle term: it interposed an almost invisible layer of matter between the seer and the seen – the sheen of a window, the silver glaze of the mirror, the convexity or concavity of the lens’ (3). In the first decades of the twentieth century, further advances established the material’s versatility, and its potential as a form of theatre (Misa 2004: 158–89). The plate-glass walls with which some of the most influential architects of the period chose to sheathe their most innovative buildings were thought to embody the International Style’s vision of the radiant city of the future. These buildings propose transparency, above all (Gropius 1937: 19–29). ‘To live in a glass house’, Walter Benjamin declared, ‘is a revolutionary virtue par excellence’ (1929: 541). Studies of modernist representations of glass have tended to concentrate either on the substance’s transparency (Siraganian 2012: 79–109, Duffy 2015) or on its brittleness (Trotter 2013: 126–32): qualities which become manifest during the process of manufacture into an object, and can therefore be examined as aspects of material culture. These are representations of the things people make which make them. That was not, however, how the materials scientists saw it. While the property of transparency ‘is at once suggested by the word “glass”’, Walter Rosenhain wrote in a book first published in 1908, there are a number of ‘true glasses’ which are not transparent at all, while some are not even translucent. Brittleness is a more reliable criterion but not entirely so. ‘Perhaps the only really universal property of glasses’, Rosenhain concluded, ‘is that of possessing an amorphous structure.’ Vitreous bodies as a whole should be understood primarily as ‘“structureless” solids’ (1919: 1). Such bodies are characterised by an ‘entire absence’ of crystalline structure. Their molecules possess the ‘same arrangement, or rather lack of arrangement’, as is found in liquids. Glasses are ‘congealed liquids’. The process of congealing involves ‘no change of structure, no re-arrangement of the molecules’, but rather a ‘gradual stiffening of a liquid until the viscosity becomes so great that the body behaves like a solid’ (2). The advances in the chemical testing and analysis of materials that Rosenhain was able to draw on in the second (1919) edition of his book could be said to have created a properly modernist consciousness of glass as a structureless solid, for writers, too, did not concern themselves only with transparency and brittleness. They found something to say about what Alan Griffith, who led research into the chemical composition of glass at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, was to term ‘The Phenomena of Rupture and Flow in Solids’ (Griffith 1921). Griffith’s research was, of course, conducted at a level of technicality well beyond the layperson’s grasp. But the muted eloquence of his title does at least propose a theme compatible, on the face of it, with experiment in literature and the visual arts. What was modernism if not a poetics of rupture and flow? The case could most plausibly

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be made, I suggest, with regard to the decisive part played by women writers in developing modernism’s ‘key formal innovations’ (DuPlessis 2016: 533). This is a familiar topic. My aim here is simply to ask what difference an account of the representation of a particular material as such might make to our understanding of two experimental texts published in the years during which one version of modernism was taking shape in London: Dorothy Richardson’s Honeycomb (1917), the third of the thirteen volumes of Pilgrimage; and May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier: A Life (1919). The bourgeois interiors described in great detail in these texts are replete with objects made of glass: windows, mirrors, lamps, tableware, ornaments, beads and so on. But their resistance to the conventions of domestic realism, and to the patriarchy it could be said to sustain, involves a grasp of something other than the object: of usable matter, of glassiness, or glass-ness. Pilgrimage, set for the most part in turn-of-the-century Britain, and largely in the mind of the protagonist, Miriam Henderson, is now acknowledged as the exemplary female modernist Bildungsroman. It is a work best known for the ‘first-person pulsing of multiple, impressionistic vectors’ (DuPlessis 2016: 549), which generates a narrative rhythm of rupture and flow. ‘Stream of consciousness’ was the term May Sinclair coined for that pulsing when she reviewed the first three volumes of Pilgrimage in the Egoist in April 1918. Richardson, Sinclair wrote, had seized reality ‘alive’. ‘The intense rapidity of the seizure defies you to distinguish between what is objective and what is subjective either in the reality presented or the art that presents’ (1918: 446). In Chapter 6 of Honeycomb, fragments set out on the page like prose poems render Miriam’s reverie in Regent Street. She pulled up sharply in front of a window. The pavement round it was clear, allowing her to stand rooted where she had been walking, in the middle of the pavement, in the midst of the tide flowing from the clear window, a soft fresh tide of sunlit colours . . . clear green glass shelves laden with shapes of fluted glass, glinting transparencies of mauve and amber and green, rose-pearl and milky blue, welded to a flowing tide, freshening and flowing through her blood, a sea rising and falling with her breathing. (Richardson 1917: 127) Reality (Miriam’s reality) has been seized by the shift of emphasis from ‘in the middle of the pavement’ to ‘in the midst of the tide flowing from the clear window’. In the middle of the pavement, Miriam is a subject among objects. In the midst of the tide flowing from the window, she is at once subject and object. The term Richardson chooses to define that fusion – ‘welded to a flowing tide’ – draws attention to material as such. Welding temporarily reduces pieces of iron or steel to a ‘plastic, coherent, and amorphous, non-crystalline (but not fluid) state’ in order to join them together (Greenwood 1884: 7). Richardson wants both the ‘reality presented’ and the ‘art that presents it’, in Sinclair’s phrase, to remain amorphous (or non-crystalline) even after it has solidified – as glass does, but not iron and steel. For Sinclair, Richardson’s method amounted to a philosophy, or guide to living. She had a sophisticated grasp of contemporary philosophies of perception, as her robust Defence of Idealism makes amply clear (1917: 53–66, 156–88, 209–25). But what she appears to have found in Pilgrimage is an original understanding of the mutual determination of perception and affect. Everything Miriam ever wanted has been withheld or taken from her. She has been reduced to the ‘barest minimum on which it is possible to

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support the life of the senses and the emotions’. And yet she is happy. What really matters, when it comes to personal well-being, is ‘a state of mind, the interest or the ecstasy with which we close with life’ (1918: 446). Sinclair’s next novel, Mary Olivier: A Life, aimed to convert Miriam’s inexhaustible enthusiasm for ‘life’ into a feminist politics, or ‘affective militancy’ (Truran 2017: 79). The key to that conversion is a figurative dialectic (Sinclair was an admirer of Hegel), established by attention to materials as such. The novel’s five parts, or ‘Books’, follow Mary Olivier from infancy through childhood and adolescence, to maturity and middle age. Mary is a generation older than Miriam Henderson, and a lot less urban: her most powerful connections are with rural Essex and North Yorkshire. The vicissitudes of a dysfunctional Victorian family – alcoholic father, remote mother, siblings who fall regularly by the wayside – reduce her, too, to a bare minimum. Her first experience of a secure basis for the life of the senses and the emotions is prompted by an excursion into the Essex countryside: ‘A queer white light everywhere, like water thin and clear.’ Returning from the excursion, she sees Five Elms, the family home, as if for the first time. Its salient feature is the ‘black glassy stare’ of the windows (Sinclair 1980: 48). Henceforth, glassiness, or glass-ness, will be what welds her to the ‘queer’ light flowing from the world into her blood. It defines her moments of ‘sudden, secret happiness’ (93). Those moments provide the foundation for affective militancy. The greatest threat to them derives not from the social and moral conformity they have violated, but from an alternative emancipation through the fulfilment of desire. Although they undoubtedly belong to her ‘real life’ (211), the men she desires acquire a different – indeed, opposite – metaphorical association to that possessed by the moments of queer, glassy happiness. Maurice Jourdain, for example, boasts smoky black eyes, tired eyelids and a ‘crystal mind, shining and flashing’ (211). The object of desire has continually to be provoked into revealing its crystalline structure: ‘If only she could set his mind moving; turn the crystal about; make it flash and shine’ (212). The crystal’s flashing and shining, however, serve to remind Mary that her moments of queer happiness do not flash and shine at all, but rather weld her into the world’s glassy flow. Her own most profound desire is to remain amorphous. So the dialectic unfolds. Subsequent encounters with crystalline men – Professor Lee Ramsden of the University of London, and the eminent classicist Richard Nicholson, with whom she falls deeply in love – at once clarify and renew her passionate belief in the supreme value of rupture and flow: ‘The globed light showed like a ball of fire, hung out in the garden, on the black, glassy darkness, behind the pane’ (321). When all her potential lovers have proved unsatisfactory and her mother, who claimed her from them, has died, the queer happiness finally comes into its own. We owe any sense we have gained of what that happiness might consist of to Sinclair’s interest in materials as such.

Iron There is, of course, more than one way in which particular materials might have achieved historical and critical significance for our understanding of modernism. Coincidences of preoccupation between fields as distinct as literature and materials science do not occur all that often, while detailed familiarity on the part of one group of innovators with the decisive work of another is hard to prove at the best of times. The second material I have chosen to concentrate on was not notable, during the first

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decades of the twentieth century, for the enthusiasm it inspired among metallurgists. Steel, an alloy of iron and carbon, had long since superseded its own main component as one of the most widely used of all man-made materials. The idea of iron, however, seems not to have been deprived by that supersession of its menacing aura. Lecturing on the material in Tunbridge Wells in February 1858, John Ruskin felt obliged to expound its function not only in nature and art, but in ‘policy’. Iron, forever capable of ‘bearing a pull, and receiving an edge’, was notable above all for its ‘tenacity’: ‘These powers, which enable it to pierce, to bind, and to smite, render it fit for the three great instruments by which its political action may be simply typified; namely, the Plough, the Fetter, and the Sword’ (1858: 395). Iron had become the embodiment or realisation of the will to pierce, bind and smite. So it remained, in association with law, necessity, the Duke of Wellington, the ‘heel of despotism’, and any number of acts of real or imaginary violence up to and including the ‘curtain’ which fell across Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. By 1900, global capitalism had also staked its claim to a share of the menace. The financier Holroyd, in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904), presides over ‘immense silver and iron interests’ from his headquarters in San Francisco: ‘an enormous pile of iron, glass, and blocks of stone at the corner of two streets, cobwebbed aloft by the radiation of telegraph wires’ (1983: 90, 97). During the early years of the twentieth century, that High Victorian sonority fed into, and was brought down to earth by, a new, scientifically enhanced preoccupation with urban noise. William Bragg devoted one of six Royal Institution lectures he gave in December 1919 to ‘Sounds of the Town’ (1921: 67–98). What distinguished the city street as a sonic environment was the capacity of one sound arising within it to cancel or muffle another. ‘One of the most interesting of town sounds’, Bragg noted, ‘is the reverberation sometimes found in public buildings, an effect which makes it difficult to hear a speaker’ (81). ‘Interference’ had long been the term used by sound and light engineers to describe the way which in two waves reinforce or neutralise each other when their paths meet (Barton 1908: 42). Its use expressed an increasing preoccupation with what would subsequently come to be known as ‘signal-to-noise’ ratio. Bragg concluded his Royal Institution series with a lecture on ‘Sound in War’, which describes the use of listening devices to track submarines and aeroplanes, or incoming gunfire (Bragg 1921: 161–96). In this case, the problem was how to distinguish the identifying sound emitted by a target from noise in and beyond the channel created by the device. We can see here the beginnings of an informational approach to sound-waves. Iron, of course, was not the only material which sounded in the modern city. But it seems to have acquired a particular – menacing – association with interference, or noise. ‘Terrible the noise of iron all the while, breaks my head’, D. H. Lawrence reported from San Francisco in 1922, ‘and the black, glossy streets with steel rails in ribbons like the path of death itself’ (1987: 290). The terrible noise was industrial capitalism’s most damaging emanation, an iron cacophony. By the end of the decade, in ‘What Is a Man to Do?’, Lawrence was decrying the fate of the millions dancing the ‘dry industrial jig’ of ‘corpses entangled in iron’: a dance from which there was no escape, ‘for the iron goes through their genitals, brains, and souls’ (2013: 1. 545). Iron sounds, in modernist literature. It sounds at the point at which sound itself becomes indistinguishable from, or lost in, noise. The sound it makes is the sound of noise. There is a striking example of the literary use of iron as an index to interference or noise in a scene in another novel by Conrad, Chance (1914). The scene involves a

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conversation in the East India Dock Road in London between Conrad’s go-to narrator, Charlie Marlow, and young Flora De Barral, the daughter of a disgraced financier. This being Conrad, the circumstances are too complicated to explain in full. Suffice it to say that the conversation turns on (or skirts around) a letter Flora has sent to the sister of the man she has just eloped with. The letter amounts to an ‘unreserved confession’ (2002: 159). An intimacy develops between her and Marlow, as their glances meet ‘in contact more familiar than a hand-clasp, more communicative, more expressive’ (155). Needless to say, internal constraints abound on this exchange of confidences about love and death between a teenager and a middle-aged sea-captain. Conrad, however, wants also to insist on interference from outside the channel of communication established by the meeting of glances. As they converse on the pavement outside a hotel, Marlow, at least, has trouble in blocking out ‘the odious uproar of that wide roadway thronged with heavy carts’ (157). The uproar climaxes as Marlow confirms that he has not read Flora’s letter: ‘Just then the racket was distracting, a pair-horse trolly lightly loaded with loose rods of iron passing slowly very near us’ (159). The sound made by those loose rods is an index to the ultimate determination of her predicament not so much by the ‘chance’ the novel’s title advertises as by the mechanisms of the industrial and finance capitalism it has otherwise done no more than sketch in outline. Iron sounds, too, as noise from the street, from public life, in Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘Revelations’ (1920). The protagonist, Monica Tyrell, suffers terribly from her nerves in the hours from eight o’clock in the morning until about half-past eleven. On the day in question, her suffering is exacerbated by the fierce wind which rattles the house, and by a cry of ‘Coal! Coal! Coal! Old iron! Old iron! Old iron!’ sounding from the street below her bedroom window (2001: 192). She seeks sanctuary at the hairdresser’s salon. But there will be no respite from noise: ‘The wind rattled the window frame; a piece of iron banged’ (195). As in Chance, the iron banging compounds the difficulties that self-absorption has already created for communication and mutual understanding. It turns out that the hairdresser’s young daughter had died in the early hours of the morning. The sound of iron in the streets could be said to have acquired the status of an official acknowledgement of mortality. In another of Mansfield’s stories, ‘The Wrong House’ (1919), the similarly fearful Mrs Bean shuts the door of her house on the noise made by the hooves of the horses pulling a hearse: ‘Clockety-clock-clock. Cluk! Cluk! Clockety-clock-cluk! sounded from outside, and then a faint Cluk! Cluk! and then silence. They were gone’ (2001: 666). In the ‘Calypso’ episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Leopold Bloom, emerging from the jakes, reminds himself to check the time of Paddy Dignam’s funeral: ‘A creak and a dark whirr in the air high up. The bells of George’s church. They tolled the hour: loud dark iron.’ The darkness in the sound of the bells alters Bloom’s mood significantly: ‘Poor Dignam!’ (1993: 67). Like Conrad and Mansfield, Joyce needed a way to indicate how public systems impinge all the time, even on those private lives they do not thereby alter fundamentally. There is always interference. In the ‘Sirens’ episode of Ulysses, Bloom arrives at the Ormond Hotel shortly after Blazes Boylan has set out for 7 Eccles Street, where he will soon have sex with Molly. The barmaid-sirens, bronze Miss Douce and gold Miss Kennedy, seem well equipped to offer distraction to an assembly of bar-flies. But the episode opens on another sound altogether – on noise, in fact: ‘Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing’ (245). The steely-ringing hoof-irons belong to the horses in the

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viceroy’s cavalcade, which passes by outside the hotel. The noise they make is the least of Bloom’s problems, we might imagine. Joyce nonetheless insists upon it, weaving its harshness into an otherwise melodious soundscape. Miss Kennedy served two gentlemen with tankards of cool stout. She passed a remark. It was indeed, first gentleman said, beautiful weather. They drank cool stout. Did she know where the lord lieutenant was going? And heard steelhoofs ringhoof ring. No, she couldn’t say. But it would be in the paper. O, she needn’t trouble. No trouble. She waved about her outspread Independent, searching, the lord lieutenant, her pinnacles of hair slowmoving, lord lieuten. Too much trouble first gentleman said. O, not in the least. Way he looked that. Lord lieutenant. Gold by bronze heard iron steel. (259) These unnamed gentlemen are interlopers at the Ormond. They have no narrative significance. By thus cordoning off interference by official public occasion from the imminent fates of the novel’s main and subsidiary protagonists, Joyce insists all the more powerfully on its ubiquity. It is there, even (or especially) when we do not notice it. Something similar occurs in Henry Green’s Living (1929), which is set in and around a Birmingham iron foundry, and so comes as close as modernist fiction ever did to a description of the manufacture of materials. In the foundry, the signals transmitted by the human voice struggle to penetrate the ubiquitous and perpetual din of machines. The black sand strewn on the floor adds a note of darkness. On one occasion, a worker – summoned into the narrative for this purpose only, like Joyce’s two gentlemen – sings to celebrate the birth of a son. The song is said to come out from ‘behind’ the din. ‘Everything in iron foundries is black with the burnt sand and here was his silver voice yelling like bells. The black grimed men bent over their black boxes.’ The song gladdens all of the listeners except one, who ‘had bitterness inside him like girders and when Arthur began singing his music was like acid to that man and it was like that girder was being melted and bitterness and anger decrystallized, rising up in him till he was full and would have broken out’ (Green 2017: 76). The man appears to have iron’s harshness inside him, which the song’s silvery message somehow decrystallises. Once again, a material’s reputation has served to dramatise the fineness of the adjustment of signal-to-noise ratio necessary under more or less all circumstances, and the unpredictability of its effects.

Ghosts I have chosen to concentrate on traditional solid materials like iron and glass because I want to demonstrate that the scientific and technological advances of the early decades of the twentieth century created a context for literary experiment. But one result of those advances was the rapid development of new synthetic and semi-synthetic substances, most notably plastic: cellulose nitrate (celluloid), from the 1860s; viscose rayon, from the 1890s; cellulose acetate and cellophane, from the late 1920s; PVC and polystyrene, from the early 1930s; Perspex, from 1935; nylon and polythene, from 1938 (Trotter 2013: 32–4, 132–65). These undoubtedly deserve further attention. I suspect, however, that future research may take the direction of the less tangible and less sonorous among materials. Steven Connor, for example, has described a ‘hazy’

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or ‘nebular’ modernism whose abiding preoccupation was ‘how to write, paint, photograph, compose, from within the condition of the atmosphere’ (2006: 16). We might well think that haze does not constitute usable matter, although gas, a not dissimilar particulate substance, most certainly does (Connor 2003). The point is, however, that ‘atmosphere’ had begun to acquire – as much in technological as in aesthetic discourse – a certain materiality, as a space or dimension in which stuff happened. When Walter Benjamin used the term ‘Medium’, he did not mean to refer to the development of film, radio or television. For these, he reserved the term ‘Apparat’ or ‘Apparatur’. ‘Medium’ refers instead, Antonio Somaini notes, to ‘the spatially extended environment, the milieu, the atmosphere, the Umwelt in which perception occurs’ (2016: 6). In its first appearance in essays written during the 1910s, the term indicates a realm or domain (colour, the pictorial mark, language, criticism, memory) in or through which relations can be established. Thereafter, it solidified into the concept of milieu which underpins, often in opposition to the concept of apparatus, Benjamin’s foundational enquiries into the nature of modernity. One effect of the experiments he conducted with hashish between 1927 and 1934 was to suggest that the drug significantly enhances the user’s capacity to perceive ‘aura’, which he thought of as a notable density in the ‘medium’ or atmosphere surrounding a person, place or object. His topic now was the ways in which a series of rapidly evolving technical Apparate had begun to reconfigure the milieu or Umwelt constituting what he was to describe in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’ as the ‘medium of perception’ (Benjamin 1936). Such an emphasis is not all that far removed from the account Virginia Woolf had given in ‘Modern Fiction’ (1925) of the novelist’s proper subject-matter or ‘stuff’: ‘Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end’ (1984: 150). That semi-transparent envelope has the feel of usable matter. Such considerations may have been behind the otherwise rather surprising interest shown by some modernist writers (women, in particular) in that quintessentially late Victorian or Edwardian genre, the ghost story. The period of the composition of the ‘uncanny stories’ May Sinclair began to write in 1910, and eventually published under that title in 1923, was also that of her closest association with the literary avant-garde: Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, H. D., T. S. Eliot. In 1933, Mary Butts published a substantial commentary on the uses of the supernatural in fiction in four consecutive issues of The Bookman (Butts 1998). Then there were the two anthologies edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith: The Ghost Book: Sixteen New Stories of the Uncanny (1930) and The Second Ghost Book (1952). The latter contains a characteristically thoughtful introduction by Elizabeth Bowen, as well as her story ‘Hand in Glove’. Traditional ghosts had been confined to antique manors, graveyards, yew walks, cliff edges and the like, Bowen wrote, but modern ghosts roam at will: ‘They know how to curdle electric light, chill off heating, or de-condition air. Long ago, they captured railway trains and installed themselves in liners’ luxury cabins; now telephones, motors, planes, and radio wave-lengths offer them self-expression’ (1962: 102). The modern ghost converts atmosphere into usable matter. Wavelengths may have worked for some. Others, like those operative in Butts’s ‘With and Without Buttons’ (1932), still required the more tangible medium of fabric. The story takes place in a ‘very old’ cottage, now divided into two dwellings, in a ‘remote village in Kent’ (1962: 22). The narrator and her sister live in one half of

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the cottage; Trenchard, a retired colonial civil servant, lives in the other. The sisters decide to punish Trenchard for his obstinate, contemptuous rationalism by staging an apparition. They will leave odd kid gloves lying around in unexpected places. It soon dawns on them, however, that gloves have begun to turn up in unexpected places without anyone actually having put them there. The sisters join forces with Trenchard in a search for the source of the infestation. Their attic yields a cardboard box full of gloves which stink abominably: ‘“I know what it is,” said Trenchard: “smelt it in Africa in a damp place. Bad skins”’ (31). If iron is revealed as a material by the harshness of the sound it emits when struck, then the animal skin out of which a glove has been made persists most forcefully as a sickening odour: as a reputation filtered, in this case, through colonialism. The leather smells of Africa. But the ghosts at work in the cottage have devices other than odour at their disposal. On two occasions, shapeless pieces of fabric, revolting to touch, somehow infiltrate themselves into the cottage by way of the attic skylight. One of these ends up wrapped around Trenchard’s head. The nausea he feels is what the story leaves us with. Someone, something, has created an atmosphere out of usable matter. This final example should have served to reinforce my main contention: that the several potentially fruitful directions in which the study of materials as such might lead us do not include material culture, for while the material culture paradigm has produced some exemplary studies of modernist clothing (Marshik 2017; Plock 2017; Wallenberg and Kollnitz 2019), it is unlikely to tell us much about the stink of leather and the feel of shapeless pieces of cotton or calico. Here, people are not making things, nor things people. Materials as such have a different story to tell.

Works Cited Armstrong, Isobel (2008), Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830– 1880. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barton, Edwin H. (1908), A Text-Book on Sound. London: Macmillan. Beer, Gillian (1996), Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benjamin, Walter (1996–2003a [1929]), ‘The Destructive Character’, in Selected Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, vol. 2, pp. 541–2. Benjamin, Walter (1996–2003b [1936]), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’, in Selected Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, vol. 4, pp. 251–83. Bowen, Elizabeth Bowen (1962), ‘The Second Ghost Book’, in After-Thought: Pieces about Writing. London: Longmans Green, pp. 101–4. Bragg, William (1921), The World of Sound. London: G. Bell and Sons. Brown, Bill (2015), Other Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butts, Mary (1962), ‘With and Without Buttons’, in From Altar to Chimney-Piece: Selected Stories. Kingston, NY: McPherson and Company, pp. 22–38. Butts, Mary (1998), ‘Ghosties and Ghoulies’, in Ashe of Rings and Other Writings. Kingston, NY: McPherson and Company, pp. 333–64. Connor, Steven (2003), ‘An Air that Kills: A Familiar History of Poison Gas’, (last accessed 20 January 2022). Connor, Steven (2006), ‘Haze: On Nebular Modernism’, (last accessed 20 January 2022).

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Conrad, Joseph (1983), Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Conrad, Joseph (2002), Chance: A Tale in Two Parts, ed. Martin Ray. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Danius, Sara (2002), The Sense of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Deetz, James (1967), Invitation to Archaeology, Garden City, NY: Natural History Press. Duffy, Enda (2015), ‘Irish Glass’, Critical Quarterly, 57: 3, pp. 80–92. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau (2016), ‘Newer Freewomen and Modernism’, in The Cambridge History of Modernism, ed. Vincent Sherry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 533–54. Forty, Adrian (2012), Concrete and Culture: A Material History. London: Reaktion Books. Garrington, Abbie (2013), Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Garrison, John (2015), Glass. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Green, Henry (2017), Living. New York: New York Review Books. Greenwood, William Henry (1884), Steel and Iron, 2nd edn. London: Cassell. Griffith, Alan Arnold (1921), ‘The Phenomena of Rupture and Flow in Solids’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 221, pp. 163–98. Gropius, Walter (1937), The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, trans. P. Morton Strand. London: Faber and Faber. Hall, Christopher (2014), Materials: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Highfill, Juli (2014), Modernism and its Merchandise: The Spanish Avant-Garde and Material Culture, 1920–1930. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Joyce, James (1993), Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lawrence, D. H. (1987), Letters, vol. 4, ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, D. H. (2006), Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ed. Michael Squires. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Lawrence, D. H. (2013), Poems, ed Christopher Pollnitz, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mansfield, Katherine (2001), Collected Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Mao, Douglas (1998), Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marshik, Celia (2017), At the Mercy of Their Clothes: Modernism, the Middlebrow, and British Garment Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Miller, Daniel (2010), Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press. Misa, Thomas J. (2004), Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ‘Molecular Forces’ (1923), Times, 14 September, p. 6. Morrisson, Mark S. (2017), Modernism, Science, and Technology. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Murphet, Julian, Helen Groth and Penelope Hone, eds (2017), Sounding Modernism: Rhythmic and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Plock, Vike Martina (2017), Modernism, Fashion, and Interwar Women Writers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ‘Progress of Science, The’ (1925), The Times, 28 December, p. 7. Richardson, Dorothy (1917), Honeycomb. London: Duckworth. Rosenhain, Walter (1919), Glass Manufacture, 2nd edn. London: Constable. Ruskin, John (1903–12 [1858]), ‘The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art, and Policy’, in Works, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. London: Longmans, Green), vol. 16, pp. 375–411.

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Saunders, Max (2019), Imagined Futures: Writing, Science, and Modernity in the To-day and To-morrow Series, 1923–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sinclair, May (1917), A Defence of Idealism: Some Questions and Conclusions. London: Macmillan. Sinclair, May (1980 [1919]), Mary Olivier: A Life. London: Virago. Sinclair, May (1990 [1918]), ‘The Novels of Dorothy Richardson’, in The Gender of Modernism, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 442–8. Sinclair, May (2006), Uncanny Stories. Ware: Wordsworth Editions. Siraganian, Lisa (2012), Modernism’s Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Somaini, Antonio (2016), ‘Walter Benjamin’s Media Theory: The Medium and the Apparat’, Grey Room, 62, pp. 6–41. Trotter, David (2013), Literature in the First Media Age: Britain between the Wars. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Truran, Wendy (2017), ‘Feminism, Freedom and the Hierarchy of Happiness in the Psychological Novels of May Sinclair’, in May Sinclair: Re-Thinking Bodies and Minds, ed. Rebecca Bowler and Claire Drewery. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 79–97. Wallenberg, Louise and Andrea Kollnitz, eds (2019), Fashion and Modernism. London: Bloombsury Visual Arts. Whitworth, Michael (2001), Einstein’s Wake. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Woolf, Virginia (1984), ‘Modern Fiction’, in The Common Reader: First Series. London: Harcourt, pp. 146–54. ‘X-ray Research’ (1920), Times, 6 March, p. 13.

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9 Advertising: Magazine Ads and the Creation of Femininity in Early Twentieth-century America Einav Rabinovitch-Fox

D

uring the last third of the nineteenth century, the United States experienced the rise of a new mass market that reshaped social, political and economic relationships. Changes in transportation and development of new technologies, as well as shifting trends in immigration and labour, brought with them a restructuring of business practices and a surge in mass production that ushered in a modern era of consumption. New patterns of merchandising, display and distribution enabled more and more people to gain access to new products, creating a distinct culture that historian William Leach defines as ‘Consumer Capitalism’. This culture was based on celebration of the ‘new’, the valorisation of individual pleasure and the heralding of monetary value as the predominant measure of worth, and placed consumption and the circulation of goods at the centre of its aesthetic and moral sensibilities (Leach 1994: xiii–xiv). The advertising industry, together with other consumer institutions such as department stores and the press, was instrumental to the development and entrenchment of this modern consumer culture through the shaping of social and cultural attitudes. By promoting a modernist aesthetics and using new print technologies, advertising offered Americans, who had traditionally welcomed modernisation and technological progress, advice on how to negotiate their search for identity in a changing world, pushing products as answers to the public’s concerns and fears (Marchand 1985: 9–13). Advertising – both as communication technology and as a profession – created a new visual language that capitalised on the increasingly visual orientation of a society that emphasised appearance and personality. The use of images for commercial purposes grew in conjunction with the popularisation of mass media and technological improvements in printing. By the 1890s, many big monthly magazines – Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, Delineator, Woman’s Home Companion and Pictorial Review among them – dropped their price to ten cents, becoming more dependent on advertising revenues than on subscribers for profits. This move not only expanded these magazines’ circulation and outreach dramatically, but also turned them into a profitable arena for advertisers, who tapped into potential new consumers. The gradual introduction of colour printing and the increasing numbers of illustrations added to the visual appeal of magazines as an advertising space. As advertisements became an integral part of magazine content, their commercial message also entered contemporaries’ daily lives and homes (Scanlon 1995: 9; Laird 1998: 220–7; Peiss 1998a).

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Yet advertising not only promoted the consumption of goods, but also served as a means for promoting social values and ideologies. Just like trends in architecture and art, which gave a tangible expression to modernist ideas, advertising was a medium that operated as an agent of modernisation. As historians of advertising have shown, advertisements function both as a mirror of social attitudes and as an efficient medium for shaping popular notions, especially regarding gender, race and class (Davis 2000; Lears 1994; Marchand 1985). Particularly during the early twentieth century, a time of tremendous social change, advertising became a potent medium through which contemporaries made sense of these changes. Both as a technological form of communication and as a form of art, advertising encapsulated modernist ideas and aesthetics. The vision that advertising offered was commercial in its nature and was targeted towards the white middle class. However, while advertisements’ messages were almost never too radical or too subversive for the potential consumer to relate to, advertising did function as an agent of change and as a modernising force, promoting new images, new identities and new values. Since women comprised the bulk of magazine readership and consumers, advertisers largely catered to their tastes and wills by selling an image of femininity that appealed to large segments of the population. As a 1917 promotion piece for the ad agency J. Walter Thompson Company argued, 85 per cent of all retail purchases were made by women, and thus it was important to address them directly and efficiently (Women in Advertising 1917: 7–8). Indeed, as advertisers’ assumption that the consumer was a ‘she’ became an undisputed truth in the industry, advertising became a tool to define her image and its meanings. In their attempts to win women’s hearts, minds and wallets, advertisers constructed their own standards of what the ‘modern woman’ should look like and how she should behave, also shaping public discourses and understandings in the process. However, the power of advertising to mould public opinion was never absolute. Although new technologies enabled advertisements to become more persuasive and powerful, the construction of female modernity in the interwar period was a constant process of negotiation. Often advertisements presented conflicting messages, simultaneously celebrating women’s freedom and demarcating its boundaries. This chapter examines how advertising provided new spatial and visual means to shape modern feminine identities and their meanings in the early twentieth century. During the 1920s and 1930s, American advertising content and style adopted a distinctly modern look that transformed both the industry and Americans’ attitudes towards consumption. By focusing on advertisements for consumer products that became associated with modern living – cosmetics, cigarettes, cars and electrical appliances – I argue that the advertising industry constructed modernity as a distinctly female experience, using the appeals of consumer culture to define what it meant to be a modern woman. These consumer products not only facilitate a more convenient, prosperous and mobile way of life, but were themselves new technologies that constructed modern female bodies and selves. Advertising played a crucial role in the mainstreaming of these techniques, highlighting the process of (re)shaping women’s bodies and movement as crucial to the production of modernity (Nicholas 2015: 38). While the vision that advertisements and ad people (many of them women) created was often limited in terms of race and class, it promoted female modernity as a liberating and a democratic experience, offering women tangible ways to imagine their new roles in society. Furthermore, women were not passive objects on which modernity

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was imposed through consumerist ideology, but played an active role in shaping the identity of the ‘modern woman’. In understanding these women’s negotiation of both the possibilities and limits that consumer culture enabled them, this chapter recentres advertising as an important realm where modernity, gender notions and questions of power were being redefined in the interwar period in America. I shift the focus from the masculine gaze and technologies of production as the defining experiences of modernity to highlight the important role that women’s consumption had in shaping modernity. Far from being a superficial or ephemeral medium, advertising enables us to put women back into the narrative of modernism, not only as objects but as active agents. *** Advertising as a promotional technology had developed in the early nineteenth century with the mercantile revolution that brought consumer goods to the American public. Yet, if in the 1920s advertising was not a new technique, it became more sophisticated, creative and innovative than in previous decades, and thus also more influential. Moving away from carnivalesque, chaotic and sometimes even dubious forms of marketing by peddlers and hustlers, ad agencies that formed in the late nineteenth century adopted more systematic, corporate and scientific methods of promotion (Lears 1994; Peiss 1998a). Advertisers began in the 1920s to implement new psychological theories about motivation and identity that shifted the marketing viewpoint from the product to the consumer. Increasingly, the main emphasis was on targeting women’s emotional yearnings, which were formulated as if they were tangible objects attainable through the acquisition of goods. Rather than providing information about a product, advertisements began to sell a state of mind, a lifestyle – a worldview and constitutive reflection of the consumer for whom the product was intended (Marchand 1985: 9–13). Advertising copy included participatory anecdotes and illustrations, and used more direct, colloquial language that propelled consumers to imagine themselves in certain environments and scenes not necessarily connected directly to use. For example, an advertisement for Camel cigarettes invited the reader to imagine herself at the horse track, applying her good taste and ‘fine breeding’ not only to her ‘good clothes, good manners, good society’, but also to her selection of cigarette brand (Camel Ad 1929a: 152a). Technological and commercial developments in print and photography were instrumental to these changes. In particular, the evolution of photolithography, photoengraving, halftones and electrotype techniques facilitated the production of images and improved the overall appearance of ads in magazines. Increasingly, small, non-visual copy, confined in half-columns and the corners of pages, was replaced by full-page displays with bolder headlines and large images. These technological improvements turned magazines into a more visually oriented medium. But more importantly, they made print content much more consumer-oriented (Garvey 1996: 9–11; Laird 1998: 218–20). In periodicals such as Ladies’ Home Journal, The Delineator, Vogue and Saturday Evening Post, distinctions between editorial and promotional content were often blurred. Many advertisements were disguised as advice columns, stories and op-eds, and editorials in general promoted a consumerist agenda which, even if not promoting a specific brand, solidified the connections between consumption, beauty, modernity and progress (Scanlon 1995: 202; Peiss 1998a).

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Moreover, the gradual introduction of colour printing made images not only more realistic and authentic, but – most importantly to advertisers – eye-catching (Leach 1994: 45, 50). According to historian Roland Marchand, in the early 1920s, ads in colour had grown to occupy between twelve and thirty-eight per cent of magazines’ pages, creating a powerful statement against the greyish blandness of other pages. The use of colour in ads contributed to the process of turning utilitarian products into fashion goods, thus enhancing the message that ads were selling a lifestyle more than a product (Marchand 1985: 121–2). A colour advertisement for Cannon towels, for example, marketed its product as a fashionable accessory, arguing that, like the fashionable woman, a ‘Bathroom needs new clothes’ (Figure 9.1). Describing the towels as if they were a collection of clothes, the ad described the ‘[f]all fashions’ as ‘more handsome and helpful than ever’. Offering the choice of six bright colours, ranging from yellow to red and purple, the ad informed the reader that they ‘were chosen by a noted stylist, after a careful study of the new bathroom tones’. Depicting two fashionably dressed women in a bathroom surrounded with colourful towels, the copy situated towels not as an everyday product but as part of a fashionable wardrobe (Cannon Ad 1931: C3). Notions of gender, as well as class, played an important role in influencing the visual language of ads. Framing women as experts in style and fashion, advertisements used colourful images that spoke directly to the potential consumer’s sense of taste. However, although advertisers put great effort into trying to understand women’s motives, desires and worldviews, these efforts were often based more on predetermined assumptions regarding women’s roles and character. In general, Victorian gender notions that viewed the female consumer as passive, capricious, irrational and ignorant maintained their hold on advertisers even into the 1920s and 1930s (McGovern 2006: 36–7). Advertising expert Carl Naether, for example, advised copywriters to use soft and more suggestive terminology, poetic images, French phrases and delicate touches, arguing that such techniques would be more effective on women than on men. Moreover, despite acknowledging the importance of presenting a ‘woman’s point of view’ in ads, Naether believed that ‘copy for sales letters, booklets and advertisements intended for feminine reading should, in general, be first prepared by men’ (Naether 1928: 19). This approach led to a limited view of women’s experiences as advertisers treated all female consumers as a universal group, united by their supposed natural inclination to beauty, motherhood and ‘inarticulate longing’ for material goods (Peiss 1998a). Ads for women tended to focus more on the benefits of consumption, deliberately and carefully appealing to the consumer’s subjective desires and fears (Marchand 1985: 11–16, 66–9). While, overall, advertisers saw women as rational consumers, they promoted social mobility and popularity as the most desirable effects of a product. Slogans such as ‘You Can Look Younger’ on the one hand, and ‘She looks old enough to be his mother’ or ‘Once she was welcomed . . . now she isn’t invited’ on the other, entailed both promises and warnings for social consequences in relation to product use (Madame Jeannette Ad 1926: 101; Listerine Ad 1931: 115; Lysol Ad 1928: 77). This new form of emotional marketing was seen as more suitable for targeting women and it increasingly became part of the mainstream style of advertising in the interwar period in America. If the malleable and gullible ‘Mrs. Consumer’ image maintained its popularity, changes in women’s lives as well as in the advertising business helped to revise some

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Figure 9.1  Cannon Towels advertisement, Vogue, 1 October 1931. Image published with permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

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of the attitudes towards women. New informational technologies, such as market research and customer surveys implemented by the industry in the 1920s, offered a more nuanced depiction of the female consumer. A 1924 article in the leading trade journal Printers’ Ink divided female consumers into four groups: the housewife, toward whom ‘the largest percentage of advertising is aimed’; the ‘society woman’, who was identified as a young girl being ‘the chief consumer of fashionable clothing, cosmetics, toilet articles, and all sorts of high-priced luxuries’; and lastly, the ‘club woman’ and the ‘business woman’, two new types of consumers, whose needs differed from those of ‘the woman in the home’ (Maule 1924: 105). While there were many overlaps between these groups, this classification expanded the variety of feminine cultural types, allowing a more complex understanding of the modern woman. In addition, the growing numbers of women working in the business also helped to change attitudes towards consumers. These highly educated, middle-class, white women, often involved in reform or suffrage work prior to their careers in advertising, brought with them a more complex ‘woman’s point of view’, which created a less monolithic understanding of the ‘typical’ female consumer (Davis 2000: 80–1; McGovern 2006: 40–1; Sivulka 2012: 151–2). Frances Maule – a veteran suffragist who made a career as an executive copywriter at J. Walter Thompson Advertising Company – argued that ‘[w]hen we sit down . . . to try to visualize the woman purchaser, we should do well to recall to our minds the fact – so well expressed in the old suffrage slogan – that “Women Are People.”’ Maule rejected the ‘good old conventional “angel-idiot” conception of women’, which was ‘hard to find in real life’ or unlikely ‘to be true of any wide class of modern women’, and instead suggested that women be seen as a more complex group of types and interests (Maule 1924: 105). Based on her own experience as a market researcher at a department store sales counter, Maule argued that advertisers should treat women first and foremost as rational consumers. She stressed that despite differences between them, as consumers, all women were practical, used a good deal of shrewdness, were capable of good judgement and thus deserved the utmost respect from advertisers (Maule 1922: 9–11). Although women like Maule comprised a small minority (women made up only about three per cent of professionals in advertising in 1930) and these women were generally relegated to gender- segregated departments and occupations in ad agencies, their status as ‘experts in femininity’ enabled them to gain some influence in the industry (Peiss 1998a). ‘Having all these domestic and personal interests in addition to what is strictly her “job” is what makes [a woman] a better advertising person,’ argued one of Maule’s colleagues, Aminta Casseres. Unlike men, Casseres claimed, adwomen could get intimately acquainted with products targeted at women to create better and more effective copy that appealed to female consumers (Casseres 1926: 87). Embodying a unique position both as representatives of the ‘modern woman’ and as an influential authority in shaping her image, these female professionals created the ideal consumer in their image. They portrayed her as a competent, independent and fashion-savvy woman who sought to take advantage of the new possibilities that became available. While this was a fairly narrow image that heralded the young, white, middle-class career woman, it posed an important alternative to the Victorian ‘Mrs. Consumer’, expanding the visual vocabulary with which women could identify. Indeed, while many ads celebrated the society woman who lived a life of leisure, no small number of ads, like the one for Ford (Figure 9.2), specifically targeted the modern businesswoman, depicting women in

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Figure 9.2  Ford advertisement, Vogue, 1 April 1924. Image published with permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

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work settings and offices and appealing to their specific needs as working women (Ford Ad 1924a: 128; Good Shepherd Ad 1935: 110). Yet, these adwomen not only used their position to create a more complex view of the female consumer or to legitimise women’s work for wages. Many – especially those who entered the profession after working for women’s suffrage – harnessed advertising to promote more feminist agendas that celebrated women’s independence and freedom. In a campaign for Pond’s Cream that used celebrities’ testimonials to promote the product, the female copywriters intentionally secured the wealthy suffragist and feminist Alva Belmont to give the first endorsement. Although it was unclear what commercial value Belmont brought to the campaign, particularly as she refused to put her face on the ad, the copywriters insisted on launching it with an interview that associated the cause of women’s rights with the importance of skin care (Scanlon 1995: 192–6; Pond’s Ad 1924: 65). Thus, although their feminist message was always entangled in a consumerist agenda, adwomen played an important role in diversifying attitudes towards female consumers. Through their ad copy, they helped in the mainstreaming of feminism in popular culture, providing legitimacy for women’s demands for freedom and equality. Indeed, American advertisers, regardless of their gender, were not ignorant of the changes in women’s status and consciousness as a result of their mobilisation during the First World War and the success of women’s suffrage. As more women entered education, the labour force and politics, they used their role as consumers to advance social agendas and bolster their claims for citizenship. Women organised boycotts and ‘buycotts’, protesting against rising food prices, labour conditions and public health hazards (Glickman 2009; Cohen 2003; Frank 1994; Orleck 1995; Storrs 2000). Yet they also used their power as consumers to claim individual freedoms and to challenge gender norms regarding propriety and sexual expression (RabinovitchFox 2016; Nicholas 2015). Advertisers capitalised on this new reality by reshaping the image of the female consumer and adjusting commercial messages to appeal to this sentiment. Rather than portraying the career woman or the young, sexually liberated girl as a threat, advertisers marketed these ‘types’ as new feminine role models in the interwar period. In particular, advertisers capitalised on women’s new sense of political citizenship to promote sales. Framing consumption as a political exercise, advertisements equated marketplace choices with political freedom, thereby emphasising women’s ‘natural’ role as consumers as the manifestation of their political rights (McGovern 2006: 67–8, 70). According to advertising consultant Christine Frederick, consumers ‘vote in broad democratic fashion at great popular elections, the polls being open every day at a million or more retail stores’ (Frederick 1929: 322–3). Frederick suggested that advertisers should take note of this power and use it to boost sales. A General Electric advertisement implemented Frederick’s advice, harnessing women’s new sense of freedom as a sales tactic. Titled ‘The Suffrage and the Switch’, the ad conflated the achievement of women’s suffrage with the progress that electricity brought to domestic life (Figure 9.3). Portraying a fashionable woman turning an electrical switch next to a smaller picture of a woman’s hand casting a ballot, the copy announced that ‘[w]oman suffrage made the American woman the political equal of her man. The little switch which commands the great servant Electricity is making her workshop the equal of her man’s’ (General Electric Ad 1923: 69). Similarly, an ad for Campbell’s

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Figure 9.3  ‘The Suffrage and the Switch’, General Electric advertisement, The Independent, 18 August 1923. Soups encouraged the American Housewife to ‘cast her daily vote for Campbell’s at the grocery store’ (Campbell’s Soup Co. Ad 1923: 91) Another ad for Nujol Laboratories adopted the suffrage slogan ‘Equal Rights for Women’ in promoting their product, assuring the reader that ‘Every woman has the right to be as healthy, vigorous and efficient as her husband, son, brother, or friend’ (Nujol Ad 1919: 58). By providing a prescription for modern femininity, one in which women perform their household duties while also realising their political citizenship, advertisements like these framed consumption not as a frivolous act, but as a parallel arena for choice and control, one where women could exert their rationality as citizens and express their modern selves (Cott 1987: 172; McGovern 2006: 81–5). Yet in framing consumption as citizenship, these empowering messages also reduced political participation to a consumer choice, equating political power with buying products. Advertisers also promoted a democratic message, suggesting that through consumption all women could become part of modern culture. ‘You are not barred from beauty,’ an advertisement for a face cream announced (Daggett & Ramsdell Ad 1926: 131). Marketing beauty as a right every woman was entitled to possess, an ad for Palmolive soap claimed that ‘This Beauty Every Girl Can Have’ (Palmolive Ad 1922: 75). This type of marketing constructed modernity as an attainable goal and as a right. However, it also constructed modernity as an individual choice, disregarding more structural economic and racial social barriers that might have prevented women from fully participating in consumer culture. ‘Perhaps the only trouble with your complexion is just – lack of willpower,’ a 1924 ad for Woodbury soap suggested. Putting the onerous task of achieving beauty on women’s personal decisions, it told the reader that the reason ‘why so many

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women fail to keep a lovely skin after they have passed their twenties’ was because they were too lazy or too incompetent to maintain a ‘simple daily care’ regimen for their skins (Woodbury Soap Ad 1924: 95). Moreover, while advertisements celebrated individuality, they also encouraged conformity, using peer pressure and claims for the national popularity of their products in order to entice sales. An ad for Camel cigarettes argued that while gowns and jewellery – ‘these things [that] are so much a part of the subtle web of personality’ – reflect ‘the clever woman’s’ distinct taste, their choice in cigarettes ‘is strikingly uniform’ (Camel Ad 1929b: C4). Instead of encouraging one’s individual taste, the Camel ad promoted adherence to a conformist ideal to which all women should aspire. Advertisers also played an instrumental role in the popularisation of a new youth culture that arose after the war, which put an emphasis on sexual expression and individual self-fulfilment (D’Emilio and Freedman 2012: 233–4, 241). Capitalising on the image of the ‘flapper’, the beauty ideal of the post-war decade, advertisements positioned her youth as the epitome of freedom and modernity. A 1929 Franklin Automobile Company ad, for example, argued that their car was ‘as smart and as modern as youth itself’, and a Cadillac advertisement claimed that ‘one quality that women deeply admire in the Cadillac is its unrivalled capacity of remaining young’, thus making youth synonymous with modern technology (Franklin Ad 1929: C2; Cadillac Ad 1924: 105). The flapper image, itself reminiscent of modern skyscrapers and vertical simplicity, became associated with technological progress and its benefits. An ad for Edison Mazda Lamps titled ‘Let Me SEE Your Wares’, also exploited the connection between the flapper’s image and modernity by depicting a fashionable flapper on a background of New York City. Announcing that she was ‘the purchasing agent of America’, the ad targeted store owners who wanted to be associated with what the flapper represented. ‘I must see things well displayed in good light,’ the flapper in the copy advised. ‘Good lighting in your display windows draws me into your store. Good light inside shows me that your store is neat, clean, sanitary, modern – a safe place to buy’ (Mazda Ad 1929: 149). By celebrating the modern flapper as a positive selling point, ads like this helped to popularise her image and legitimise her behaviour. Yet, they also constructed the flapper not as a passive consumer, but as an independent agent of modernity who had the power to bring technological advancement. As they depicted women driving cars, using appliances or just enjoying the perks of modern living, advertisements framed women’s freedom not as a threat to gender norms but as a necessary component of the modern woman and of modern living (Jordan Ad 1926: 140). It was through their use of technology and its celebration in advertising that women became crucial to the dissemination of modernism. Rather than through production, the flapper’s affinity with technology was through her consumption of modern products. Ads framed consumption in itself both as a testament for technological savviness and as the route to achieve it. Women’s freedom thus became associated with modernity and the advancement of science, positioning technology as the enabler of women’s sexual, economic and political freedoms. Advertisers framed modernity as a female trait, turning consumption into the vehicle through which the liberated modern woman could claim her independence. An advertisement for Ford Motor Company, for example, encouraged women to ‘venture into new and untried places’, asserting their freedom to challenge conventions and break social limitations (Ford Ad 1924b: 47). Similarly, an advertisement for Perfection Oil Cook Stoves and Ovens heralded its product as providing women with a ‘New Freedom’ from long kitchen hours and the domestic realm. Depicting a young, fashionably

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dressed woman stepping into a car driven by another woman, the advertisement alluded to the possibility that modern consumption enabled women (Cleveland Metal Products Co. 1925: 141). By connecting consumption and women’s liberation, advertising constructed the modern consumer not as a submissive housewife, but as an independent and modern woman. Through the use of technology, women could free themselves not only from the drudgery of household chores, but also from traditional gender conventions and roles. Technology thus became the conduit through which women could both experience freedom and claim it. The theme of freedom was most pronounced in a campaign for Kotex disposable sanitary pads. First launched on the national market in 1921 by Kimberly-Clark, the Kotex disposable sanitary pads were themselves a new technological invention that signified modernity in their production and function, but also through their marketing tactics. Often depicting a single woman or a group of women in active, leisurely settings, ads appealed to women’s desire to participate in modernity without barriers of tradition or propriety. By alluding to the technological and military origins of the product – developed from bandages used in hospitals during the First World War – the ads touted the scientific knowledge invested in creating the pads and emphasised their sanitary and hygienic qualities. Yet, Kimberly-Clark moved beyond marketing the pads as mere technological solution. The Kotex campaign turned the consumption of mass-made sanitary pads into a lifestyle choice for modern women, allowing them to exhibit their bodies even while menstruating. It also turned technological savviness into a crucial component of modern femininity, furthering the connection between women’s bodies and progress (Mandziuk 2010: 43, 46–8). While using women’s sexual appeal as a selling strategy had been a common theme in advertisement since the 1910s, the Kotex campaign specifically connected sexuality to ideas of women’s mobility, independence and active lifestyle. Although ads never discussed menstruation explicitly, the campaign offered a new understanding of women’s sexuality, seeing it not as a burden but as a thing to be celebrated. Ads promoted the idea that a woman could and should be active outside of the home, even during their menstrual period. ‘Active outdoor days demand this comfortable, lasting sanitary protection,’ one copy announced (Kotex Ad 1930a: 25). Depicting two young women dressed in masculine riding attire and close-fitting hats in front of a car, the ad offered a visual template for the modern woman who was not afraid to challenge social taboos regarding both her sexuality and her appearance. Moreover, despite presenting menstruation as a ‘bodily problem’ and not as a natural phenomenon, ads offered women a route to claim their freedom by adopting not only a modern technology but also a modern lifestyle. ‘Active Women of Today are Free,’ announced another ad, legitimising the freedoms that women were beginning to claim for themselves. Depicting a group of three young, fashionable women, one holding a tennis racket and the others golf clubs, the ad asserted that women are now free from the ‘handicap of yesterday’s hygienic worries’ and can wear sheer frocks, engage in sports and live their lives to their full potential (Kotex Ad 1927: 15). Yet, the freedom that Kotex offered was not without limitations. One ad suggested that although women were free to engage in various activities, they still had to maintain rigid standards of beauty and behaviour. Modern living demands both freedom and perfect poise, no matter what day of the month, or if engaging in sports, business or ‘some other interest’, it argued (Kotex Ad 1930b: 16a).

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Thus, although advertising provided a space for women to imagine new freedoms and alternatives to the Victorian model of femininity, the commercialised nature of advertisements also set the boundaries of these freedoms. Indeed, advertisements often sent conflicting messages to their readers. On the one hand, advertisers characterised female consumers as potentates ruling over the market, naturalising their sovereignty and public power as political subjects. Yet, on the other hand, they were also careful not to portray women as too independent, emphasising that their status as ‘citizen consumers’ was limited to the realm of domesticity and women’s traditional gender roles (McGovern 2006: 75, 79–80; Davis 2000: 81–3). An advertisement for Libby’s canned beef boasted this kind of message, arguing that a woman can ‘be a good mother and home-maker without sacrificing the time she needs for her own self-development’. If the copy promoted a feminist message that women could and should pursue their own interests beyond the domestic sphere, it did not challenge more traditional gender conventions that it was a woman’s responsibility to make dinner for her family. While canned beef helped save time on household chores, the ad did not call for a more equal division of labour within the house, or advocated for women to forgo their familial duties. Rather than providing a challenge or reconfiguring gender roles, the ad reinforced them by bounding them in a consumerist discourse. Modern technologies like canned beef and hygienic pads could offer women freedom from the home but not from the confines of femininity (Libby’s Ad 1920: 57). Advertisements also did not offer all women the possibility to enjoy the promises of the modern consumer culture. The segregated nature of the advertising business meant that the ideal American consumer was often imagined very narrowly, as a middle-class, white and, as the 1920s progressed, young woman. Indeed, although advertisements offered variety in terms of age and marital status, they also delineated clear boundaries in terms of class and race. Especially in popular magazines, non-white women were never depicted as modern or young, and most certainly not as potential consumers (Scanlon 1995: 171, 211, 219–23). African Americans, for example, were commonly represented as servants or chauffeurs, or as stereotypical ‘mammy’ characters, most notably ‘Aunt Jemima’ (Aunt Jemima Mills Company Ad 1925: 114).1 Perpetuating racist notions and visions of slavery, advertisements counterpoised the Black female body with ideals of technological modernity and feminine beauty that were always presented as white (Scanlon 1995: 220; Manring 1998: 88–9, 131–3). Depictions of other women of colour were no less stereotypical. In a campaign for Palmolive soap, the promises of modern beauty, presented by an image of a young, modern, bobbed-hair flapper, were touted as the triumph of modern science over ancient traditions. The ad juxtaposes the image of the flapper in the top right corner with a depiction of two Middle Eastern women dressed in ethnic clothes in the bottom left corner (Figure 9.4). The two women, one with white skin and the other Black, represent the ‘Oriental’ allure of the product, based on a ‘blend of rare oriental oils, famous for 3,000 years as cosmetics’. Yet they were not depicted as models of beauty but as a primitive version of the modern woman. Moreover, the position of the women also conveyed the superiority of modern science. Not only was the Black Middle Eastern woman kneeling in front of her white partner, but it was the modern flapper who looked down at both of them, creating a clear hierarchy of both race and progress (Palmolive Ad 1922: 75). Other ads from the campaign positioned the modern woman with images of ancient Greece or Egypt, capitalising on the exotic allure of these cultures. The depiction of

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Figure 9.4  ‘This Beauty Every Girl Can Have’, Palmolive advertisement, The Ladies’ Home Journal, January 1922. Image published with permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

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‘Oriental others’ in advertising, especially from Asia, was used to demarcate class and racial hierarchies, validating the white American middle-class woman’s modern superiority and power as consumer (Takagi 2003: 301–19). If women of colour were barred from modernity, advertising offered more options for ethnic white minorities in America to engage with modern consumer culture. Ads for cosmetics and beauty products provided Southern and Eastern European women, and even Latinas, with ‘a route to whiteness’ via hair removal and skin-bleaching products that promised to change their appearance. According to these ads, through this intervention of cosmetic technologies that were meant to alter their bodies, ethnic white women could access modernity and its promise of progress. Some ads capitalised on the ‘exotic’ designation of ethnic white minorities, appealing specifically to immigrant women and encouraging them to embrace their looks. For example, an advertisement for Armand Beauty Products promoted the diversity of ‘beauty types’, alluding to the oriental origins of types like Cleopatra and the Queen of Sheba. Defined as ‘dark and mysterious’, these types suggested that non-Anglo-Saxon women could also be beautiful if they would use the right product. However, despite the inclusive message, the variations between the looks were minuscule: all ‘types’ represented white, young women who differ only in hair style and colour. Such framing pointed to the limitations that advertising could offer to women who could not fit with the white, middle-class image of the flapper (Peiss 1998b: 145–9). In the end, advertising afforded the promise of modernity only to those who had access to certain class and race privileges, constructing femininity in narrow terms. Indeed, the vision advertisements presented was full of contradictions. As Marchand has argued, the casting of women as modern subjects in ads relied on a complex balance that defined modernity both as the realm of business rationality (efficiency, control, technological sophistication) and as the realm of fashion (expressiveness, changeability, luxury). Yet despite women’s progress in the business sense of the term ‘modern’, it was their modernity in the fashion sense of the term that was more dominant (Marchand 1985: 168). Readers had to navigate between empowering messages that credited them with the agency to shape their lives, and a limiting perspective on how their lives should look and what the important things were to which they should aspire. Yet in these navigations, advertising also opened up a space, albeit subtle and non-radical, to negotiate more complex understandings of the modern woman and her changing roles in society. As advertisements depicted women in scenes of leisure and work, driving cars and playing sports, they acted as agents of change, turning these activities into part of the everyday life of American women. They not only positioned women as the beneficiaries of technological progress, but turned technology into the main route through which female modernity was manifested and made possible. And as advertisements convinced women to enact their independence, their freedom or their right to be beautiful, they also framed consumption as a tangible route to achieve these goals. While only a minority of women could live up to the ideal that was presented in ads, the modern woman’s image became a cultural standard that has shaped contemporaries’ views of femininity in this period. *** Advertising in the early twentieth century served as a cultural barometer for changing attitudes and values in society. Ads provided a prescriptive template for engaging

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with modern life, in which young, white, middle-class, slender and beautiful women achieved freedom through the consumption of goods. Advertising offered women new ways to invent themselves, an access to independence and a legitimisation of their sexuality. Yet, these promises were often limited by class and racial barriers that prevented a full participation in the market and enjoyment of the opportunities it provided. Nevertheless, the use of gendered discourse and imagery that was based on emotional appeal and use of colour shifted the focus to the role of women as consumers and provided contemporaries with a visual vocabulary to shape the meanings of modern feminine identities. While advertising did not invent the modern woman, it played a crucial role in demarcating the boundaries of her image and her freedom. Connecting modernity and technological savviness to understandings of gender, advertising became the medium through which the modern woman and her meanings came to be defined in public discourse.

Note   1. The racist image of Aunt Jemima has come under scrutiny as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement and the protests following the death of George Floyd. After years in which Aunt Jemima stood for Black oppression and the romanticising of slavery, the company announced, as of 17 June 2020, it will no longer use the image on its products.

Works Cited ‘Aunt Jemima Mills Company Ad’ (1925), The Ladies’ Home Journal, March, p. 114. ‘Cadillac Ad’ (1924), Vogue, 15 September, p. 105. ‘Camel Ad’ (1929a), Vogue, 12 October, p. 152a. ‘Camel Ad’ (1929b), Vogue, 8 June, p. C4. ‘Campbell’s Soup Co. Ad’ (1923), Harper’s Bazaar, November, p. 91. ‘Cannon Ad’ (1931), Vogue, 1 October, p. C3. Casseres, Aminta (1926), ‘Agencies Prefer Men!’, Printers’ Ink, August, pp. 35, 82, 85–7. ‘Cleveland Metal Products Co. Ad’ (1925), The Ladies’ Home Journal, May, p. 141. Cohen, Lizabeth (2003), Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Knopf. Cott, Nancy F. (1987), The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ‘Daggett & Ramsdell Ad’ (1926), The Ladies’ Home Journal, January, p. 131. Davis, Simone Weil (2000), Living Up to the Ads: Gender Fictions of the 1920s. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. D’Emilio, John and Estelle B. Freedman (2012), Intimate Matters, 3rd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ‘Ford Ad’ (1924a), Vogue, 1 April, p. 128. ‘Ford Ad’ (1924b), The Delineator, October, p. 47. Frank, Dana (1994), Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender and the Seattle Labor Movement 1919–1929. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ‘Franklin Ad’ (1929), Vogue, 22 June, p. C2. Frederick, Christine (1929), Selling Mrs. Consumer. New York: Business Bourse. Garvey, Ellen Gruber (1996), The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture 1880–1910. New York: Oxford University Press. ‘General Electric Ad’ (1923), The Independent, 18 August, p. 69.

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Glickman, Lawrence B. (2009), Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ‘Good Shepherd Ad’ (1935), Vogue, 1 September, p. 110. ‘Jordan Ad’ (1926), Vogue, 1 June, p. 140. ‘Kotex Ad’ (1927), Vogue, 1 September, p. 15. ‘Kotex Ad’ (1930a), Vogue, 13 October, p. 25. ‘Kotex Ad’ (1930b), Vogue, 29 September, p. 16a. Laird, Pamela Walker (1998), Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Leach, William (1994), Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York: Vintage Books. Lears, Jackson (1994), Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. New York: Basic Books. ‘Libby’s Ad’ (1920), The Ladies’ Home Journal, February, p. 57. ‘Listerine Ad’ (1931), Harper’s Bazaar, July, p. 115. ‘Lysol Ad’ (1928), The Ladies’ Home Journal, May, p. 77. McGovern, Charles (2006), Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship 1890–1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ‘Madame Jeannette Ad’ (1926), The Ladies’ Home Journal, September, p. 101. Mandziuk, Roseann M. (2010), ‘“Ending Women’s Greatest Hygienic Mistake”: Modernity and the Mortification of Menstruation in Kotex Advertising, 1921–1926’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 38: 3/4, pp. 42–62. Manring, Maurice M. (1998), Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Marchand, Roland (1985), Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity 1920–1940. Berkeley: University of California Press. Maule, Frances (1922), ‘How to Get a Good “Consumer Image”’, JWT News Bulletin, 84 (March), pp. 9–11, JWT archives, Box MN5: JWT News Bulletin 1922–1930, Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, NC. Maule, Frances (1924), ‘The “Woman Appeal”’, Printers’ Ink, 31 January, pp. 105–10. ‘Mazda Ad’ (1929), Saturday Evening Post, 11 May, p. 149. Naether, Carl (1928), Advertising to Women. New York: Prentice-Hall. Nicholas, Jane (2015), The Modern Girl: Feminine Modernities, the Body, and Commodities in the 1920s. Toronto: Toronto University Press. ‘Nujol Ad’ (1919), The Delineator, March, p. 58. Orleck, Annelise (1995), Common Sense and Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States 1900–1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ‘Palmolive Ad’ (1922), The Ladies’ Home Journal, January, p. 75. Peiss, Kathy (1998a), ‘American Women and the Making of Modern Consumer Culture’, Journal for Multimedia History, 1: 1, (last accessed 20 January 2022). Peiss, Kathy (1998b), Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. New York: Henry Holt. ‘Pond’s Extract Co. Ad’ (1924), The Ladies’ Home Journal, February, p. 65. Rabinovitch-Fox, Einav (2016), ‘Baby, You Can Drive My Car: Advertising Women’s Freedom in 1920s America’, American Journalism: Journal of Media History, 33: 4, pp. 372–400. Scanlon, Jennifer (1995), Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture. New York: Routledge. Sivulka, Juliann (2012), Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes: A Cultural History of American Advertising. Boston: Wadsworth.

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Storrs, Landon R. Y. (2000), Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers’ League, Women’s Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Takagi, Midori (2003), ‘Consuming the “Orient”: Images of Asians in White Women’s Beauty Magazines, 1900–1930’, in Sexual Borderland: Constructing an American Sexual Past, ed. K. Kennedy and S. Ullman. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 303–19. ‘Women in Advertising’ (1917), Printers’ Ink, 23 August, pp. 7–8. ‘Woodbury Soap Ad’ (1924), Vogue, 1 May, p .95.

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10 Photography: Gertrude Käsebier and the Maternal Line of Sight Alix Beeston

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o misquote Freud’s apocrypha: sometimes a lollipop is just a lollipop. Even though the photograph is named for them – rather, because the photograph is named for them – the lollipops in the girls’ hands are a distraction, a mischievous diversion (Figure 10.1).1 If, as seems likely, the sweets were a means of occupying the girls’ attention, keeping them still before the large-format camera, then the title of the image extends the beguilements of the portrait scenario. My eyes are drawn to the lollipops, as to the huge bow in little Mina’s hair, as to the white kitten cuddled under her cousin Elizabeth’s arm. But they are also turned away from these cute details, from these girls, who are drenched in a brightness that obscures almost as much as it illuminates. Pooling at the bottom of the stairs, washing about the room, this same light carries the series of looks that structure the image. Mina looks sidelong at Elizabeth, as Mina’s mother, Hermine, looks over at her from the doorway by the stairs, and as her grandmother, Gertrude – who operates the camera – looks on at them both. In this chapter, I argue that this scene of looking, with its circuit of women’s and children’s gazes, offers a new vantage on the practices and effects of modernist photography in the United States, as they developed in proximity to the material, vernacular and feminised visual cultures of modernity. At the turn of the twentieth century, Gertrude Käsebier was one of the most successful portrait photographers in the US, celebrated especially for her luminous, dreamy depictions of white mothers and their children. ‘Lollipops’ was taken in 1910, and it sits alongside Käsebier’s earlier and better-known pictures of motherhood, such as ‘Blessed Art Thou among Women’ and ‘The Manger (Ideal Motherhood)’ (Figures 10.2 and 10.3). Like these images, as Laura Wexler argues, ‘Lollipops’ ‘glorifies white women’s role within the domestic sphere’ and reflects Käsebier’s investment in discourses of child education that emerged in the late nineteenth century (2000: 182). Hermine Turner, Käsebier’s daughter, is presented as the modern, middle-class mother following the methods advocated by Friedrich Froebel’s kindergarten movement. As Ann Taylor Allen has explained, Froebel’s doctrine of ‘spiritual motherhood’ called for child-rearing practices that balanced attention and inattention, ‘careful tending and unforced growth’ (1982: 319, 322). In Käsebier’s image, Hermine’s gaze slips through the banisters to sustain the girls with, in Wexler’s words, ‘just the right mixture of maternal shelter and freedom’ (2000: 188). Meanwhile the photograph, in representing this delicate system of relations, also reproduces that system. As Käsebier’s gaze arranges this tableau of daughter and

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Figure 10.1  Gertrude Käsebier, ‘Lollipops’, ca. 1910. Digital positive from the original gelatin silver negative. Library of Congress, Gift of Mina Turner, 2006684252.

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granddaughters, it models more perfectly the ideal mother’s view. After the invention of photography in the 1830s and throughout the modernist period, the actions of the camera challenged conceptions of the art object in its oscillations between the human and the mechanical, between artistry and automation, and here the camera’s doubled modality is phrased as a specifically maternal problem, for Käsebier, more decisively than her daughter, is active and passive, hands on and hands off, there and not there. Once her surveilling presence was taken for granted in the daily lives of her family members: ‘We were neither bored nor excited by the picture taking’, recalled Mina after her grandmother’s death; ‘it was just one of those things that happened, like sneezing or brushing your teeth’ (cited in Michaels 1992: 134). Now Käsebier’s presence inheres in her photographs as an open secret – as if she remains under her focusing cloth still today, hidden in plain sight. In more than one sense, then, the philosophy of mothering that Käsebier passes down to Hermine is extended by and folded back into her photographic work. Part of the first cohort of American women photographers to achieve significant commercial and artistic success, Käsebier promulgated a sentimental mythology of white motherhood that underwrote the US imperialist construct in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although the famous studio portraits Käsebier took of Lakota people in the late 1890s and early 1900s were lauded for their empathy, those images interact with her icons of white motherhood to normalise raced and classed logics of dominance.2 In the case of ‘Lollipops’, it is not difficult to see a representation of the mother’s supporting function within the white supremacist and imperialist modern nation, as the network of vertical and horizontal lines creates a visual symmetry between the upright figure of Hermine and the columns that line the stairs. And yet: why is ‘Lollipops’ so eerie? Why do the children invite and refuse my gaze? How should I parse Hermine’s solemn expression, which feeds the larger feeling of the image, a sombre mood that shades into the sinister? Käsebier’s image is distinguished by this combination of poignancy and ominousness, telescoped to Hermine’s face, as she watches the children without, presumably, being seen by them. But of course she is seen – by Käsebier, and also by us. To look with impunity at those who do not see you is the risky spectatorial pleasure of all portrait photography. As gazes multiply in ‘Lollipops’, the image puts pressure on its visual operations, to some degree destabilising them. If the mother–photographer charms us with lollipops, does she also surveil us? Or are we otherwise implicated in this circuit of seeing, this maternal line of sight? ‘Lollipops’ is inexactly aligned with Progressive-era discourses of white motherhood, and it works in excess of those discourses. Beginning with the questions raised but not resolved in Käsebier’s image, this chapter attends to it – along with a number of other family photographs Käsebier made in and around her New York City studio in 1909 and 1910 – as an index of a crucial moment of transition in the cultures and traditions of modernist photography in the US. The period in which Käsebier posed Hermine and her grandchildren for these images was also the period in which she was making a break from the photographer Alfred Stieglitz and his influential PhotoSecession: a break, that is, from the artists and organisations that we most readily associate with American modernist photography. Käsebier is an unusual figure within the field of modernist cultural production, even though she was one of the most prominent photographers working in New York in the years when the city’s association with modernism and modernity became entrenched. She was thirty-seven years old when

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Figure 10.2  Gertrude Käsebier, ‘Blessed Art Thou among Women’, 1899. Photogravure. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mr and Mrs Miguel LaSalle and Peter Sinclair, 83.263.

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Figure 10.3  Gertrude Käsebier, ‘The Manger (Ideal Motherhood)’, 1899. Platinum print. J. Paul Getty Museum, 84.XM.160.1.

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she enrolled at art school, in 1887, and approaching fifty when she opened her first studio in the Women’s Exchange on East 30th Street, off Fifth Avenue. The height of her career coincided with her becoming a grandmother and she was soon known as ‘Granny’ not only within her family but also in photography circles. She sat uneasily between the archetypes of the True Woman and the New Woman, remaining beholden to the nineteenth-century cult of motherhood and yet committed to photography, in her words, as a medium ‘especially adapted’ to women and primed to yield for them ‘gratifying and profitable success’ as artists and professionals. These remarks are from a lecture Käsebier gave at the Photographic Society of Philadelphia in 1898, in which she also attested to how she ‘had to wade through seas of criticism’ on account of her heretical views – before joking, with characteristic wit, about ‘the advantage of a vocation which necessitates one’s being a taking woman’ (1898: 270, 272). Käsebier is not quite True, not exactly New. Even so, I turn to her as a way of not turning to Stieglitz, or Paul Strand, or Ansel Adams, or Edward Weston – the host of men who are most often cited as the ‘fathers’ of modernist photography in the US. My focus on Käsebier’s family photography – and, more specifically, on work that dates from the later and less studied part of her career – also serves to reroute the critical tradition that relates to photography in modernism. To conceive of modernist photography as ‘mothered’ by Käsebier rather than ‘fathered’ by Stieglitz – to emphasise how, around 1910, Käsebier quits Stieglitz, rather than the other way around – is to recalibrate our understanding of photography as technology and art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is to see modernist photography as shaped in tandem with, not in opposition to, the materiality and dailiness of modern experience. Käsebier’s ‘mothered’ photography stages ‘touching’, affective encounters between subject and object, viewer and viewed, formulated through a line of sight which is also a line of descent. Her work anticipates Roland Barthes’s account, in Camera Lucida (1980), of photographic light as a ‘carnal medium’ that ‘links the body of the photographed thing to [the spectator’s] gaze’ via a ‘sort of umbilical cord’ (2000: 80–1). Barthes’s account has been reimagined in recent work by feminist scholars that theorises a relational and transferential model of the photographic medium.3 Similarly, Käsebier’s work foregrounds the embodied labour of photography as, to return to Mina’s phrase, ‘just one of those things that happened, like sneezing or brushing your teeth’. As ‘Lollipops’ indicates, the photograph is an enigmatic object, even a volatile one. According to Barthes, ‘Society seeks to tame the Photograph, to temper the madness which keeps threatening to explode in the face of whoever looks at it’ (2000: 117). Karen Beckman interprets this madness in relation to the medium’s silence, its stubborn refusal to speak: the ‘illegible messages’ that condense the vital complexities and conceptual lability internal to any photographic image (2013: 317). I have argued elsewhere that the most vital affordances of photography in modernism are those associated with its rupturing of the visual field, its diffusing of the truths it was meant to guarantee.4 Because of its indexicality, its apparent fidelity to the real, the camera seemed poised to fulfil the fantasies of Cartesian perspectivalism, the dominant (if not uncontested) scopic regime of modernity. Yet these fantasies – of human individuation, of epistemic objectivity, of the mastery of the eye that knows what it sees and sees what it knows – were in fact frustrated by photography. The photograph disclosed too much and too little. It contradicted the actions of the human eye in focus, perspective and framing, revealing Walter Benjamin’s ‘unconscious’ substratum of visual experience

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(2007: 237). At once, the photograph multiplied optical mistakes and puzzles, introducing a ‘new magic of the visible’, in Jean-Louis Comolli’s terms, which burdened ‘the human eye . . . with a series of limits and doubts’ (1980: 123). Photographic practice in modernism (and beyond) was conditioned by these paradoxical effects, which were made legible in the photograph’s privileging of equivocality and incongruity and, importantly, in the unfixed relations it establishes between observed objects and observing subjects. The photograph’s allusive meanings and motile viewing relations also augment the conceptual possibilities of interpreting modernist photography today. I therefore model the medium’s defamiliarising and decentring impulse by engaging Käsebier’s work between high-modernist and low-popular spheres, between art gallery and family photographic album, and between professional and domestic space. Including this work within the frame of modernist photography – more than that, approaching it as an important context for the development of modernist photography, at a remove from Stieglitz and the others – disrupts and disorders our conventionalised, masculinised understandings of its aesthetics and conditions. From within the purview of Käsebier’s home–studio, modernist photography appears in a new light: as a relational and affective form, deeply embedded in the lived realities of modern (family) life.

Pictorialist/Straight Gertrude Käsebier’s first studio at the Women’s Exchange, opened in 1897, was only a block away from the New York Camera Club, where Alfred Stieglitz was busy hosting events and exhibitions that sought to situate the medium of photography within the traditions of fine art.5 The two photographers became friends, and in February 1899 Stieglitz organised the first solo exhibition of Käsebier’s work. Stieglitz promoted Käsebier in his magazines, Camera Notes and Camera Work, and he counted her as one of the core members of the Photo-Secession at its formation in 1902. Her work appeared in every major Photo-Secession exhibition until 1907; it amounted to a full tenth of the images on display at the first group exhibition at the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, which opened in November 1905 at 291 Fifth Avenue (Michaels 1992: 111). However, by 1907, Käsebier and Stieglitz’s relationship had begun to sour. This was in part a reflection of shifting ideas about what modern art photography looked like. The Photo-Secession was conceived after the model of artistic secessions in Europe, notably the English Linked Ring, with which Käsebier and Stieglitz were both affiliated. It was meant to secede from traditional modes of picture-making, to break with the past in order to establish the apparatuses of photographic capture, development and printing as ‘pliant tools and not mechanical tyrants’, as Stieglitz put it in an 1899 essay (529). In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, as the messy and cumbersome collodion wet-plate technique was replaced by gelatin dry-plate negatives, and as albumen printing paper was replaced by neutral silver prints and a range of alternative printing processes, modern photography emerged as a newly expansive and multifaceted medium, offering ‘an unprecedented ease in securing negatives [and] a new malleability in the making of prints from those negatives’ (Peterson 2013: 11). When Stieglitz spoke of photography’s ‘pliant tools’ in 1899, he had in mind the techniques of pictorialist photography, a subjective genre that emulated painting

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and etching through methods of manipulation: soft focus, filters and lens coatings, darkroom editing, and the use of platinum printing or the hand-applied gum bichromate process. For Mary Fanton Roberts, writing as Giles Edgerton in The Craftsman in April 1907, Käsebier’s ‘The Manger (Ideal Motherhood)’ was ‘a study in shades of white’ – a description that, like the image itself, encodes the racial politics of whiteness (92). Simply but elegantly composed, its mother veiled by the photograph’s lack of definition as by her billowing gown and gauzy headdress, ‘The Manger’ exemplifies the pictorialist mode and Käsebier’s success with it. In fact, in 1899 Käsebier sold a print of this image for US $100, an unprecedented price for a photograph. But a few months after the publication of Roberts’s positive review of Käsebier’s work, Stieglitz registered his growing antipathy toward pictorialism’s painterly, subdued visions by including in Camera Work a parody of Roberts’s essay. Written by the critic Charles Caffin, who several years earlier had praised Käsebier’s work in this same magazine, the October 1907 article was a genuinely nasty attack piece against ‘Mr. Theodosius Bunny’, a thinly veiled stand-in for Käsebier. The article routes its critique of Käsebier’s ‘emotional art’ through sexist remarks about her weight and her sex life (‘it is no light matter I take it, to be the sleeping partner of an emotional artist’; 32). According to her biographer Barbara Michaels, Käsebier was deeply offended by this article and saw it as part of a larger effort by Stieglitz to exclude her from his circle (1992: 124–5). Between 1907 and 1912, when Käsebier made her final, definitive break from the Photo-Secession, she experienced a series of slights from Stieglitz. Yet his rejection of her – and her rejection of him – played out more generalised conflicts within the aesthetic and political project of American modernist photography. ‘Käsebier is a queer creature; she’s touchy like all women’, Stieglitz wrote in 1901 in a letter to the photographer Joseph T. Keiley (cited in Michaels 1992: 120). In the intervening years, Käsebier’s touchiness, her ‘womanly’ sensitivity, collapsed into the touchiness of her artistic practice – its touching sentimentalism, as well as the material touchings and retouchings through which she achieved her style of self-conscious refinement and aestheticisation. Increasingly, as Kathleen Pyne has argued, Stieglitz cast ‘Käsebier as the emblematic figure of a stagnant, even corrupt, feminized pictorialist aesthetic’, displacing on to her all the bourgeois repressions he had come to associate with genteel, progressivist American culture (2008: 3). Käsebier morphed from a pioneer of modern photography to its antithesis, ‘an impediment to the emergence of a more virile and vital modernism’ (16, 15). Pictorialist methods of manipulation were reformulated as contaminating gestures, seen to require a kind of aesthetic (and erotic) desublimation: a clearing away, a clarifying, of pictorialism’s blur and haze by the sharpness and facticity of ‘straight’ or ‘pure’ photography.6 Our histories of modernist photography have often followed Stieglitz’s lead, proceeding under the sign of straight photography. This masculinised rhetoric promoted a narrow, straightened view of photography’s uses and effects in the early decades of the twentieth century.7 Not merely downplaying the significance of pictorialism in modernism’s development, it obfuscated the extent to which modernism was conceptualised and constituted in a series of breaks with the past. In these repeated acts of secession, the definitions of the modern and the anti-modern were under active and uneven negotiation. In asserting the medium’s difference to other artistic forms, the precision and rich detail of straight photography served as the visual syntax of its formalist aesthetics. Purity is, as ever, a form of negation, a sloughing off of excess;

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it hangs on, and on to, its exclusions and refusals. And the refusals of straightness at the level of style are commensurate with other refusals. Stieglitz’s working methods, as Mary Woods notes, ‘projected ideas about masculine prowess and strength. . . . Working in fog, rain, ice, and snow, he courted frostbite and pneumonia’ as he stood for hours on New York streets, waiting, in Stieglitz’s words, for ‘the moment when everything is in balance’ (Woods 2009: 18; Stieglitz 1981 [1897]: 216). Responsive to the shifting light and movement of the urban environment, the modern photographer nevertheless claims a macho imperviousness to that environment. Drenched and shivering, Stieglitz cultivated that very modernist, very masculinist myth of the autonomous artist, aloof and apart from the quotidian realities of the world – as the rain, dripping from his coat, makes tangible the limits of that myth. The clean, clear surfaces of straight photography are haunted by the materiality of the world its practitioners were committed to representing with such immediacy and directness. Hence Stieglitz’s disdain for the vulgarities of commerce, his belief that an artist’s work was desecrated by the pursuit of money. It was through a discourse of anti-commercialism that Stieglitz alienated those members of the Photo-Secession who needed or wanted to make a living from photography. This included Käsebier, who saw no contradiction between art and commerce and who measured her achievement as an artist in part through her commercial success. Käsebier’s husband, who ran a prosperous shellac business, offered only grudging support for her career, but her work quickly became profitable, largely because she was willing to trespass the borders between artistic and professional worlds, displaying her commissioned portraits in galleries and selling her uncommissioned work to popular magazines (Hutchinson 2002: 60). When her husband died after a long illness in late 1909, Käsebier was left a wealthy woman, yet as she told Lord Northcliffe, a prominent British newspaper publisher who sat for her about this time, ‘I love to work. I would pay for the privilege.’ As Käsebier knew, Stieglitz could afford to ignore the costs of living and working because he had access to his wife’s fortune, the profits of his late father-in-law’s brewing business. She, on the other hand, ‘didn’t have a brewer’s daughter for [her] cash register’. ‘I thought Stieglitz was grand’, she recalled later in life. ‘When I saw he was only hot air, I quit. I remember saying to myself . . . I earn my own money. I pay my own bills. I carry my own license’ (Michaels 1992: 128). 

Secede/Succeed Käsebier secedes from the Photo-Secession by succeeding, in financial terms, declaring her independence from the anti-lucre programme of modern art through a series of deliberate public gestures. As Michaels explains, Käsebier raised Stieglitz’s ire in 1909 by choosing to enter the Professional rather than the Artistic Section of the Dresden International Photography Exhibition. And then, for the first time in years, she entered a photograph into a corporate advertising competition run by Kodak – and won third place and US $250 in prize money (1992: 128–9). The image Käsebier submitted to the competition shares something of the same recursive structure as ‘Lollipops’ (Figure 10.4). Käsebier photographs her daughter, Hermine, as Hermine directs her daughter, Mina, in photographing her son, Mason. As Mason looks out and away from these acts of picture-making, the image connects the female gaze and the apparatus of the camera as mechanisms of artistry and control.

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Figure 10.4  Gertrude Käsebier, Hermine and Mina Turner photographing Mason Turner on the roof of Käsebier’s studio at 315 Fifth Avenue (variant of prize-winning photograph in Kodak advertising contest), ca. 1909. Platinum print. George Eastman Museum, Gift of Hermine Turner. Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum. In the context of the growing rift between Käsebier and Stieglitz, Käsebier’s entrance of the photograph in the competition was an impressively ‘knowing’ gesture that contrasted with ‘the innocent and playful picture-taking activity’ depicted in the image (Peterson 2013: 24–5). Just as Käsebier moved between the technical skill and elaborate staging of ‘Lollipops’ and the effects of spontaneity and ease in the composition of the rooftop photograph, the latter image works through the productive interaction of the modernist art tradition and amateur family photography. Stieglitz, as we have seen, positions himself on the cold, wet city street in order to differentiate his methods from simpler, more domesticated ones – particularly those associated with Kodak’s pointand-shoot cameras, which were introduced in 1888. When Käsebier was establishing her portraiture business in the 1890s, she too sought to align herself with artists rather than hobbyists, not least by setting up her studio ‘at the heart of the New York art scene’ (Hutchinson 2002: 47). Such efforts are unsurprising, and not only for financial reasons. Despite the centring of the figures of mother and child within pictorialism, the movement was established in opposition to the feminised photographic practices alongside which it emerged: namely, the family portraiture and travel photography made possible by the Kodak camera. The Kodak girl, who graced advertising copy from 1893, was a young woman of freedom and gumption, the camera slung around her neck a passport for exploration outside the home. But one could just as readily be ‘At Home with the Kodak’, as an early twentieth-century catalogue declared (Figure 10.5).

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Figure 10.5  Kodak catalogue cover, ca. 1900s. Courtesy of the Martha Cooper Collection. Käsebier’s prize-winning photograph of her daughter and grandchildren is thus a version of a scenario already familiar from Kodak’s advertisements. In playing to the company’s marketing strategies, Käsebier’s image openly acknowledges the traditions of popular, mass-cultural photography that she participates in and works to reformulate. As Carol Armstrong observes, Käsebier’s photographs across her career ‘articulate the intimate dialectical structure of the relationship between amateurism and art photography that marked her period much more overtly than the work of any of her male cohorts could or did’ (2000: 104). Käsebier is not so much selling out to commercial culture as she is paying her debts to it. To be sure, modernism coincided with the ‘golden age of home portraiture’, which Christian Peterson dates from the 1890s to the 1940s (2011: 374). The expanded practices of home portraiture were ushered in by the many middle-class, mostly white women who took to photography in the 1880s and 1890s as a means of recording the lives of their children. Käsebier was one of these women, and family photography remained her privileged genre throughout her career. By the 1900s, images of her family were displayed at the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession and included in her own family albums alongside postcards and Kodak snapshots.8 A material and relational object, the family album was a key vernacular use of photographic technologies from the second half of the nineteenth century on, particularly for women. Whereas the album has usually been understood as a ‘decent, reassuring, and edifying’ genre, producing the family’s ‘imagination of its own integration’ (Bourdieu 1990: 31, 26), Daniel Novak has argued persuasively that the actions of

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collage essential to the album worked to disintegrate and denaturalise the body – and the family – by producing it as fragmented, distorted and infinitely malleable (2008: 14–15). Indeed, by the account of Käsebier’s granddaughter, Mina, practices of collage and other idiosyncratic reworkings of photographic materials were at home in Käsebier’s studio (Figure 10.6). In an undated, handwritten account of her childhood, Mina describes how she ‘loved to go to Granny’s studio’ at 315 Fifth Avenue, where Käsebier worked between 1907 and 1914, and especially to ‘a little dark attic’ that was to her ‘a treasure house’: It was full of boxes of discarded prints and mounting materials etc. – Granny gave me crayons and old bits of pastels and I amused myself by the hour coloring the photographs and drawing pictures of my own on the back of them. . . . [T]here were always strips of paper by the chopping board – trimmed edges – I loved to gather them up and make things with them. Mina then turns to describe how Käsebier herself ‘experimented with every medium & technique she could learn about’, implicitly connecting her own playful, ‘touching’ work with photographs to her grandmother’s photographic labour. She continues to attest to the imbrication of the creative work of grandmother and granddaughter by relating a time when Käsebier’s studio assistant, Alice Boughton, helped her to draw a human figure: ‘[S]he sat down and drew me a skeleton – then she put muscles on it, then flesh & hair & features. Next she dressed it and there was a complete human being. I was much impressed and delighted’ (Turner n.d.).

Figure 10.6  Gertrude Käsebier’s photographic workroom, ca. 1915. Special Collections, University of Delaware Libraries, Gift of William I. Homer.

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Käsebier’s mixed practices of exhibition and display reveal the entanglement of feminised, popular forms and apparatuses with those of masculinised, elite art in modernism, while also underscoring the market forces that shaped these intersecting arenas of culture.9 But as her camera mediates between and is remediated in high and low culture, gallery and album, and public and private spheres, it is framed emphatically as a technology of family life, the varied and embodied practices of which are passed down from grandmother to granddaughter: women who make human figures materialise in one form or another.

Home/Work In photographing Hermine in the guise of the Kodak girl, Käsebier’s duplication of a popular type is recapitulated in the image through Hermine’s own act of duplication: her teaching Mina to operate the camera. In Käsebier’s studio on Fifth Avenue, as Mina scribbles on photographs, ‘making things with them’, she understands herself to be her grandmother’s heir; and in the rooftop image, on the top of the building that houses that studio, Mina is given to us as Hermine in miniature – just as her name is a compacted version of her mother’s. Käsebier makes Hermine a photographer, Hermine makes Mina a photographer, and the family is presented in a kind of mise-en-abîme, an infinitely recurring sequence of copies and copies’ copies, smaller and smaller all the way down. The image is patterned after and destined for Kodak’s mass-produced advertisements in illustrated magazines or on billboards, and it obliquely figures the technological reproduction of the photographic medium through the reproduction of the family, and of the family business. Like mother, like daughter: Käsebier’s portraits of her family reference the iterative – procreative – functions of her medium, which synch with the imperatives of capitalistic production and trade. And as they take these reproductive functions as their theme, both Käsebier’s portraits and Kodak’s advertisements give new significance to the position of the cameras held by the women at their bellies. Together with ‘Lollipops’, the rooftop portraits mark an evolution not only in the style and aims of modernist photography but also in the life and work of Käsebier’s family. The family she photographed around 1910 is made up of women and children; it is a family conspicuously without men. I am tempted to read this absence of men as an extension of Käsebier’s rejection of Stieglitz and his ilk. Yet it is Käsebier’s recently deceased husband, Eduard Käsebier, who is the more palpable ghost in these photographs. There is little record, as Michaels notes, of the effect on Käsebier of Eduard’s death in December 1909 – and this absence too is suggestive (1992: 130). Certainly, Käsebier was unsentimental about marriage when, in 1915, she gave the title ‘Yoked and Muzzled: Marriage’ to a photograph of two oxen, likening one form of constraint with another. The death of her husband, combined with her break from the Stieglitz circle, seemed to afford Käsebier a new independence, expressed in her merging of work and home. The boundaries between the two had always been permeable for Käsebier, as is suggested by the setting of her photographs of Hermine and the children in 1910: the rooftop is and is not her studio, and it equivocates, in any case, between the interior and the exterior. Indeed, part of what distinguished as modern the portraiture studios Käsebier occupied in this period was how they deliberately simulated the home. Repudiating the ostentatiousness of Victorian decoration, as well as the theatrical props associated

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with earlier photographic portraiture, Käsebier made over her studios in the manner of a domestic parlour in an unfussy Arts and Crafts style. Art covered the walls; vases of flowers and decorative pitchers sat atop carved-wood furniture; and her camera was hidden behind a tasteful screen until her (mostly women) subjects began to feel as comfortable as she was, swathed in her signature silk kimono (Michaels 1992: 56–8). In 1914, Käsebier moved from Fifth Avenue and took a large apartment on West 71st Street as a combined home and studio; she continued her thriving portraiture business there until 1920, when she moved to another apartment in Greenwich Village. In 1924, Hermine’s marriage ended in divorce and she moved in with her ageing mother, to care for her and to continue the portraiture business. Soon after that, Mina joined them, and the three women lived together and supported themselves as a multigenerational family firm until the outbreak of the Second World War (Michaels 1992: 139, 156–8). ‘Lollipops’ and the rooftop images thus reflect and forecast a photographic practice that exists on a continuum with domestic life and that is identified as women’s labour, the collaborative (home)work of mothers and daughters. The portraiture business operated by Käsebier with her daughter and granddaughter during her late career – as it is conjured in the portraits of this family taken in 1909 and 1910 – situates the intersubjectivity of the photographic scenario, which is lately elaborated by feminist scholars. Extending Barthes’s metaphor of the ‘umbilical cord’ of photographic light, which enjoins observer and observed in an experience of haptic immediacy, Elizabeth Abel theorises the ‘dense intermediate viewing space’ of photography, in which subject and object intermingle and exchange (Abel 2014: 99). For Margaret Olin, in a similar vein, the photograph is a tactile, relational object, poised to ‘participate in and create relationships and communities’ (2012: 15). Käsebier and her contemporaries tended to mystify the transferential and social effects of her portraiture, stressing the sympathy of the method by which she was able to coax her subjects into modes of self-disclosure. In 1910, for instance, the critic H. Snowden Ward described how Käsebier set her subjects at ease in the studio, taking a number of exposures and speaking with them until ‘at last (as Mrs. Käsebier said afterward) the sitter began to lose self-consciousness, and his temperament began to reveal itself’. The photographs she produced were praised as ‘human documents’ – unaffected, vital and personal (591). Käsebier cultivated this vision of herself and her work, playing into cultural conceptions of the mother as a responsive and intercessory figure, while also shrouding her images in the aura of the symbolist ‘mystical moment’: surfacing the ineffable, giving form to psychological and spiritual truths. This mythology found its fullest expression in Käsebier’s account of ‘Real Motherhood’ (Figure 10.7), a photograph she took in 1900, shortly after she became Granny through the birth of her first grandson. As she recalled in 1907, While posing my daughter there suddenly seemed to develop between us a greater intimacy than I had ever known before. Every barrier was down. We were not two women, mother and daughter, old and young, but two mothers with one feeling . . . and the tremendous import of motherhood which we both realized seemed to find its expression in this photograph. (Roberts 1907: 91–2) It is easy to dismiss these remarks for their overt sentimentalism. Yet Käsebier’s relational photographic method – more precisely her ‘motherly’ one, tethering mother

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Figure 10.7  Gertrude Käsebier, ‘Real Motherhood’, 1900. Platinum on tissue. Museums Collections, Special Collections and Museums, University of Delaware, Gift of Philip and Laura T. Shevlin, 1994.07.003.

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to mother in the space of the studio-as-home and the home-as-studio – subtends the decentring of the modern observer, in Jonathan Crary’s terms. If Käsebier’s method collapses the relation between object and subject, then it also admits the subjective, bodily formation of sight. In her hands, the photographic camera serves what Crary calls the ‘uprooting of vision from the stable and fixed relations incarnated in the camera obscura’ (1990: 14). Käsebier may have wanted to document the essential form and character of her subjects, but her camera was not the objective, detached eye of the camera obscura (as is made clear by the theatrical and atmospheric style of her pictorialist work).10 It was instead an optical toy that resembled the modern stereoscope, in Crary’s formulation: a fixture of and for her body, fastened to and guided by her corporeal subjectivity. Käsebier’s emphasis on the production of her portraits through an active, affective engagement with her subjects, a social dynamic ‘proper’ to women and to mothers in particular, denies the discontinuity of observing self and observed other – and disrupts the continuity between seeing and knowing. In this respect, we might well understand Käsebier’s family photographs not simply as relevant to modernism’s visual cultures, but as representing some of her most characteristically modernist work. Käsebier’s late family portraiture unsettles the evidentiary claims of the medium, frustrating ideals of visual mastery and control, as it foregrounds the unstable, intersubjective structure of the photographic scenario. These aspects of photography were central to its uses in modernism, whether pictorialist or straight, commercial or artistic, in the shelter of the home or out on the street – or, as with Käsebier, some combination of the same.

Order/Disorder ‘Lollipops’, too, sits in the break between seeing and knowing. I find this image as distracting as the sweets surely were for the girls it pictures. I return to it again and again, pulled in (and pushed away) by its indeterminacy of meaning, its refusal to explain; above all, its pervasive sense of loss. Much more than the rooftop portraits, this vigil of mothers and mothers’ mothers suggests the terrible promise baked into any genealogical line, the way that maternity is caught up with mortality, the assurance of death in every birth. Is family portraiture not a kind of visual cemetery, chronicling the yield of the everyday to the more essential evanescence of every generation? In at least potentially outliving the family itself, the pages of the family album are suffused with the ‘catastrophe’ and ‘defeat of Time’, Barthes’s noème, the that-has-been of the photographic subject: ‘that is dead and that is going to die’ (2000: 96). In Camera Lucida, Barthes enmeshes a loose, paradoxical philosophy of photography with an elegy for his dead mother, or vice versa; and in this, too, Käsebier foreshadows Barthes, as her family photographs stage an anxious meditation of the affinities between death and motherhood, on the one hand, and between death and photography, on the other. Connecting (or reconnecting) subject to object, living and dead, from navel to navel, both Barthes and Käsebier conceive of the photograph as a surrogate maternal body. Since the mother is the ‘originary matrix for all other reproductive acts’, as Elissa Marder argues, ‘the maternal body tends to become associated and confused with other forms of cultural labor’ defined by reproduction (2012: 3). Hence photography, like the maternal function, ‘opens up a strange space in which birth and death, bios and technē, the human and the nonhuman are brought into intimate and disturbing proximity with

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one another’. Yet as Marder demonstrates, the mother, as the sign for the event of birth – that most unaccountable, unknowable event in psychoanalytic thought – disrupts systems of representation and inspires ‘alternative, nonmimetic, nonlinear conceptions of time and space’, in Barthes’s writing as in other cultural reckonings with the maternal body (2). As much as subjects and objects are enfolded in Käsebier’s work, touching one another by her touchy method, her photographs also thematise a fragmentation of the family. Like the denaturalising effects of collage in the family album, Käsebier’s photographs disorder that which they seem most insistently to order. It is notable that the gazes that activate ‘Lollipops’ are gazes that never meet one another. One look does not cede to or join with the next; the circuit of seeing is repeatedly broken. Similarly, in many of Käsebier’s portraits of mothers and children, as Armstrong explains, the unity of mother and child is disrupted by the child’s outward glance, which ‘seize[s] upon the viewer’s attention, here and now outside of its space and time’ (2000: 132). This outward glance – what Barthes would call the punctum of the image – ‘disorganizes the family into an atomized series of separate, secretive cells’, intimating, finally, ‘the intrusion and germination of death within the heart and hearth of the family’ (135). Käsebier’s discontinuous line of sight, and her disorganised family unit, allegorise the alternative genealogy of modernist photography her work also promotes. Barthes’s theory of photography, notes Armstrong, runs counter to the dominant attitudes of art photography, which would have it be an aesthetic medium fit to vie authoritatively with others in the same discursive domain: yielding a canon of ‘great’ professional artists; predicated on visual intention and mastery of its optical apparatus, the camera; producing fine and original prints, formally unified, tonally pristine, and archivally preserved. (2000: 109) No one shaped these attitudes so much as Stieglitz. But the alternative genealogy of photography we might trace from Käsebier, not the father of modernism but its heretical Granny, does not simply replace one single, coherent lineage with another lineage, equal but opposite to it. To the contrary, it frustrates a desire for originary, solitary geniuses and their orderly line of successors – for genius turned genus, the one become a type – including as it foregrounds the practical, material and social conditions of photography in modernism.11 As Judith Fryer Davidov has argued, our male-centric and hierarchical histories of photography must be revised toward ‘the more amorphous configuration of a net’, incorporating professional women photographers such as Käsebier alongside amateurs ‘who worked from home [and] learned from each other at camera clubs’ (1998: 30). In ‘Lollipops’, even as the spectre of death attenuates the generational logic of this family of women and children, we can also trace Davidov’s network in the subjects’ replicating lines of sight, which track in multiple directions about the space, shooting off in their own directions. Primed less for the articulation than the disarticulation of linear, teleological formulations, the reproductive gaze of the mother–photographer maintains the generative madness of the photograph’s silence, hastens the defining crisis of the scopic regime of modernity, and defamiliarises our view of modernist photography – as the light at the bottom of the stairs lures and repels our gaze, sending us away blinking and dazzled.

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Notes   1. I am grateful to the volume’s editors for their incisive input into this chapter, as well as to Emily Burns, Louise Hornby, David Shackleton and Lorraine Sim, who each provided helpful feedback on early drafts. My thanks, too, to those participants and interlocutors at seminars where I presented this work in development, hosted by the Humanities Institute and the Department of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin, and the Modern and Contemporary Workshop at the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University. This chapter’s treatment of ‘Lollipops’ extends my brief analysis of this image in Object Women (Beeston 2018b).   2. On the imperialist logics of Käsebier’s portraiture, see Wexler (2000: 177–208).   3. See Beeston (2018a) and the readings of Barthes in Smith (2013: 23–38) and Olin (2012: 51–70). The links between Käsebier’s practice and Barthes’s theory of photography are elaborated by Armstrong (2000), whose larger claims about the importance of the ‘lady amateur’ in photography history and the self-reflexivity of Käsebier’s work are compatible with my argument.   4. On photography’s erosion of Cartesian perspectivalism, see Beeston (2018a: 1–11).   5. For a general account of Stieglitz’s development as a photographer, including his involvement with the New York Camera Club and the Photo-Secession, see Rose (2019).  6. Käsebier’s rejection on these terms feeds into a tradition, described by Michel Orin, of associating women’s photography with slipshod technique and a lack of quality or sharpness (1991: 123–4).  7. As Kirsten Swinth notes, the shift from pictorialism to straight photography registered a reconceptualisation of high culture in modernism, as the art world moved ‘from a realm of (feminized) genteel refinement to a space of heroic (masculine) self-expression’, largely in reaction to women’s advances in art during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (2001: 5–6). Meanwhile, according to Christian Peterson, pictorial photography flourished after the demise of Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession in 1910, becoming less ‘aesthetically homogenous and politically elitist’ (1997: 13).   8. On these mixed practices of display, see Peterson (2013: 23–4).   9. A classic account of how the categorical distinction between high–elite and low–popular art in modernism reflects a ‘paranoid’ resistance to a mass culture that is pejoratively gendered is given in Huyssen (1986). On the complex relationship of modernity and femininity, see Felski (1995). 10. For an explanation of how pictorialist aesthetics staged a ‘flight from the “real”’ that resisted photography’s production of the body as ‘legible scientific sign’, see Smith (2013: 39–72). 11. It is true that the photographer Imogen Cunningham once stated that her career was inspired by Käsebier’s motherhood images, which she saw when she was in high school (Davidov 1998: 232). Cunningham was one of a number of women photographers, apart from Käsebier’s daughter and granddaughter, whom Granny mentored and supported. But when Cunningham visited Käsebier in 1910, she observed that although Käsebier was ‘nice, warm and encouraging’ to her, she ‘tended to boss Hermine in the studio’ (cited in Michaels 1992: 158). Käsebier’s studio was collaborative and multigenerational, but it was not exactly egalitarian.

Works Cited Abel, Elizabeth (2014), ‘Skin, Flesh, and the Affective Wrinkles of Civil Rights Photography’, Feeling Photography, ed. Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, pp. 93–123.

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Allen, Ann Taylor (1982), ‘Spiritual Motherhood: German Feminists and the Kindergarten Movement, 1848–1911’, History of Education Quarterly, 22: 3, pp. 319–39. Armstrong, Carol (2000), ‘From Clementina to Käsebier: The Photographic Attainment of the “Lady Amateur”’, October, 91, pp. 101–39. Barthes, Roland (2000 [1980]), Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard. London: Vintage. Beckman, Karen (2013), ‘Nothing to Say: The War on Terror and the Mad Photography of Roland Barthes’, in On Writing with Photography, ed. Karen Beckman and Liliane Weissberg. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 297–317. Beeston, Alix (2018a), In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen. New York: Oxford University Press. Beeston, Alix (2018b), Object Women: A History of Women in Photography, (last accessed 21 January 2022). Benjamin, Walter (2007 [1935]), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 217–52. Bourdieu, Pierre (1990), Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Caffin, Charles H. (1907), ‘Emotional Art (After Reading the “Craftsman,” April, 1907)’, Camera Work, 20, pp. 32–4. Comolli, Jean-Louis (1980), ‘Machines of the Visible’, in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath. New York: St Martin’s Press, pp. 121–42. Crary, Jonathan (1990), Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Davidov, Judith Fryer (1998), Women’s Camera Work: Self/Body/Other in American Visual Culture. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Felski, Rita (1995), The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hutchinson, Elizabeth (2002), ‘“When the Sioux Chief’s Party Calls”: Käsebier’s Indian Portraits and the Gendering of the Artist’s Studio’, American Art, 16: 2, pp. 40–65. Huyssen, Andreas (1986), ‘Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other’, in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 44–64. Käsebier, Gertrude (1898), ‘Studies in Photography’, Photographic Times, 30: 6, pp. 269–72. Marder, Elissa (2012), The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction. New York: Fordham University Press. Michaels, Barbara (1992), Gertrude Käsebier: The Photographer and Her Photographs. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Novak, Daniel A. (2008), Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olin, Margaret (2012), Touching Photographs. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Orin, Michel (1991), ‘On the Impurity of Group f/64 Photography’, History of Photography, 15: 2, pp. 119–27. Peterson, Christian A. (1997), After the Photo-Secession: American Pictorial Photography, 1910–1955. New York and London: Minneapolis Institute of Arts and W. W. Norton and Co. Peterson, Christian A. (2011), ‘Home Portraiture’, History of Photography, 35: 4, pp. 374–87. Peterson, Stephen (2013), ‘The Complexity of Light and Shade: Gertrude Käsebier and the Field of Modern Photography’, in Gertrude Käsebier: The Complexity of Light and Shade, ed. Stephen Peterson and Janis A. Tomlinson. Newark: University of Delaware Press, pp. 7–30. Pyne, Kathleen (2008), Modernism and the Feminine Voice: O’Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Roberts, Mary Fanton [Giles Edgerton] (1907), ‘Photography as an Emotional Art: A Study of the Work of Gertrude Käsebier’, Craftsman, 12, pp. 80–93. Rose, Phyllis (2019), Alfred Stieglitz: Taking Pictures, Making Painters. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. Smith, Shawn Michelle (2013), At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Stieglitz, Alfred (1899), ‘Pictorial Photography’, Scribner’s, 26: 5, pp. 528–37.  Stieglitz, Alfred (1981 [1897]), ‘The Hand-Held Camera – Its Present Importance’, in Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, ed. Vicki Goldberg. New York: Simon and Schuster, pp. 214–17. Swinth, Kirsten (2001), Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870–1930. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. Turner, Mina (n.d.), ‘Mina Turner at Gertrude Käsebier’s studios’, Gertrude Käsebier Papers, MSS 149, F18, Special Collections, University of Delaware, (last accessed 21 January 2022). Ward, H. Snowden (1910), ‘Gertrude Käsebier and Her Work’, Amateur Photographer and Photographic News, 52, p. 591. Wexler, Laura (2000), Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. Woods, Mary N. (2009), Beyond the Architect’s Eye: Photographs and the American Built Environment. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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11 X-rays: Technological Revelation and its Cultural Receptions Tom Slevin

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he discovery of the ‘X-ray’ had profoundly significant effects upon modern culture: it pushed the boundaries of science and medicine, operated as spectacle for public entertainment, nourished beliefs in the paranormal and provided a subject through which printed media could raise emerging modern social and ethical issues. The fascination with X-rays, as Lisa Cartwright writes, was a ‘mania [that] swept the West at the turn of the century’ (1995: 109). Wilhelm Röntgen submitted the first research paper on X-rays on 28 December 1895 and within days the discovery appeared in newspapers, gracing the front page of the Viennese Die Presse on 5 January 1896. Knowledge of one invisible force was disseminated through another as the news was telegraphed across the world through pulsating electrical signals that circulated information with wired instantaneity. At least forty-nine books and 1,044 scientific essays on X-rays appeared in 1896 alone (see Natale 2011: 347). Whilst X-radiation generated an incredible cultural and scientific fascination, it was also enveloped into other media, from writing and literature to film and painting. Indeed, the very moment of the discovery attests to its position within intermedial modernism: Röntgen submitted his paper on X-rays on the same day as the Lumière brothers’ first public cinematic screening at the Salon Indien du Grand Café. As with the Röntgen rays, so news of the Lumières’ work spread across the world; both made a deep impact upon society, creating visible spectacles through technology’s harnessing of invisible matter. Marconi, again in 1895, achieved his first wireless telegram, creating physical effects from immaterial process through signal transmission and reception. While these new media, including X-rays, transformed and revealed hitherto concealed energies, they also invoked the realm of the dead. Marconi sought to develop an instrument for listening to the dead; photography also contained the fantastic possibility of capturing the spirits of the dead and auras of the living. Upon observing her X-rayed hand, Anne Berthe Röntgen reportedly exclaimed ‘I have seen my death!’ (Tuniz 2012: 3) (Figure 11.1). Modern technologies were folding, collapsing and transforming existing regimes of space, time, distance, speed, interiority and exteriority in different ways. The X-ray embodied technology’s promise of harnessing forces towards the expansion and increase of humanity’s powers, whilst it simultaneously contained a concurrent hauntological spectre at the heart of modernity’s ‘progress’.

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Figure 11.1  Wilhelm Röntgen, X-ray photograph of Anne Berthe Röntgen, 22 December 1895.

‘These Naughty, Naughty Roentgen Rays’ The impact of X-rays upon the imagination and visualisation of the human body was immediate. Otto Glasser (1993: 29), Linda Dalrymple Henderson (1988: 324) and Bettyann Kevles (1997: 116) all describe the profound, widespread and immediate impact of the discovery upon both scientific and public thought. Henderson considers that it ‘produced a sense that the world had changed irrevocably’ (1988: 336). Within a month, X-rays were used in surgical processes, and within six months, were harnessed by surgeons to identify bullets inside soldiers’ bodies. X-rays featured in popular public entertainment: stories and cartoons frequently appeared in the press, and X-ray machines quickly appeared as spectacular fairground attractions. X-ray equipment and images featured in shop windows, and commercial X-ray photography offered imaging services to the public (see Reiser 1990: 60). People from different backgrounds began purchasing the equipment to experiment with X-rays (Busch 2017: 329); some amateurs even built their own machines from X-ray kits. Indeed, the production of induction coils could not initially meet the overwhelming public demand (Glasser 1993: 38). Within the X-ray ‘mania’, however, an anxiety emerged about the technology and its uses. This was reflected in popular media representations, which dwelt on the erasure between public and private boundaries. A concern with this erasure is clear in the comic poem X-actly So! by ‘Wilhelma’, published in Electrical Review in April 1896: X-actly So! The Roentgen Ray, the Roentgen Rays, What is this craze? The town’s ablaze With the new phase Of X-ray’s ways.

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I’m full of daze, Shock and amaze; For nowadays I hear they’ll gaze Thro’ cloak and gown – and even stays, These naughty, naughty Roentgen Rays. (qtd in Glasser 1993: 44) Such anxiety lies within a broader cultural concern involving private and public perceptions. Albert Robida’s illustrations in ‘Variations sur les rayons X’, featured in La Nature of May 1896 (Figure 11.2), caricatures such fears, with scenario eleven depicting people wearing suits of armour in public. This reflected the actual sale of clothing designed to protect its wearers against invasive X-ray vision. Other scenarios, for example, involved prohibiting the use of X-rays in theatre glasses. Although scientists and doctors were the first purchasers of X-ray equipment, exhibition entrepreneurs joined the queue as they saw the entertainment potential of the latest visual spectacle. Exhibition audiences were increasingly familiar with a range of inventions that demonstrated the technological expansion of perception for visual entertainment, from the panoramic to developments in window dressing and the theatre to modernity’s new vision machines such as the stereoscope, camera, stereograph, kaleidoscope, diorama, zoetrope, phenakistoscope and film projector. Thomas Edison, for example, promoted popular demonstrations of X-rays just as he promoted cinema; he encouraged commercial interest from businesspeople, inventors and entrepreneurs, believing it would become the foremost spectacular modern medium (Cartwright 1995: 109). Indeed,

Figure 11.2  ‘Variations sur les rayons X’, La Nature, May 1896.

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tickets were sold for X-ray exhibitions, and it existed as visual entertainment alongside early cinematic projections. Tom Gunning has documented 1890s showbusiness trade journal advertisements of travelling exhibitors wanting to exchange film projectors for X-ray equipment – evidence, he argues, that ‘impresarios thought x-rays showed even greater potential than “animated pictures”’ (2008: 52). The visual spectacle of a screen illuminated by an intangible, quasi-invisible force was a fantastic modern technology that bordered on ‘the realm of fantasy or magic’ (Gunning 2008: 53). Some projectionists exhibited X-ray photographs whilst others amazed audiences with live physical demonstrations. Both X-ray and cinematic media projected a new, alternative regime of space and experience through technologically enhanced vision. Unlike the optical intensification of the microscope or telescope, the X-ray and cinema were open, public visual experiences, aligned more with theatre and the fairground. Whilst the history of the technical intermediality between film and X-rays lies outside the scope of this chapter, it is worth briefly considering the convergence of content between the media. Three short films from the late 1890s capture how X-rays raised issues concerning gender and social behaviour, the separation of one’s lived, experiential embodied being and the technological representation of the body as a disturbing ‘Other’. George Albert Smith’s 1897 British short film The X-Rays featured real-life partners Laura Bayley and Tom Green in a romantic sketch. A camera marked ‘X-Rays’ appears, and through a jump cut, the two figures become skeletons. The camera exits and the scene is returned to ‘normal’ vision, but Bayley is furious with Green and leaves. Her reaction is perhaps a response to Green’s motivations stripped bare as she perceives his ‘inner’ motives. However, this is unclear, as the innovative use of jump cuts indicate that the audience is in a privileged epistemic position over the characters involved. The film’s alternative title, The X-Ray Fiend, hints at further implications: either that the cameraman is the ‘fiend’ for his penetration and revelation of the two bodies, or perhaps that Green is complicit, seeking to ‘know the inside’ of the female body as a sexual and visual pun. The film reflects contemporaneous anxieties about the ‘revolting indecency’ (Kevles 1997: 166) involved in the external display of one’s internal body. In Georges Méliès’s lost 1897/8 film Les Rayons Röntgen, a scientist separates a patient’s skeleton from its flesh using an X-ray machine. The boneless body folds into a structureless heap and the skeleton dances; the process is reversed, and the skeleton is reinserted back into the body to ‘restore’ the person. Whilst far from the realm of possibility, the film nevertheless captured technological modernity’s potential for creating alienating, uncanny images of the human body distinct from the reality of lived experience. This emphasis on the associations between X-rays and uncanny visualisations is similarly apparent in Wallace McCutcheon’s film The X-Ray Mirror (1899), which features a woman trying a hat in front of a mirror. As she judges her appearance, her reflection transforms into that of a ballet dancer, and she faints at the surprise. Whilst there is little to suggest the actual intervention of X-rays, there is nevertheless an interest in the body’s transformation and a split between actual and visualised body. The narrative of each film is premised upon the potential duality of the technology: insightful yet invading, alienating or traumatising.

‘The New Light’ The relatively low cost and accessibility of the X-ray as an imaging technology were significant in its appeal to entrepreneurs, amateurs and medical communities alike (see

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Reiser 1990: 62). The first X-ray department was created at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary in 1896, led by John Macintyre, who had lectured on ‘The New Light – X-rays’ (see Thomas 2017: 333). It was here that ‘roentgenology’ (radiology) first became a medical specialism (see Busch 2017: 329). In 1897 Glasgow opened its modern ‘New Electrical Pavilion’. Prior to modern inventions that imaged bodily interiority – such as the X-ray, ophthalmoscope and laryngoscope – medical diagnosis largely consisted of haptic, tactile and acoustic processes. Internal corporeality was not visible without the physical act of being turned inside out. However, nineteenth-century visual technologies overturned prior forms of tactile and acoustic diagnosis. Reiser argues that ‘X-rays directly challenged the use of touch in diagnosis’ (1990: 63), embodying a shift from physical exploration to visual medical diagnosis through the exterior imaging of bodily interiority. Unlike acoustic diagnosis, the image produced by X-ray photography provided evidence and testimony independent of the patient, something that Reiser identifies as part of a wider modern shift within Western medical practice towards isolating and separating the condition and its symptoms from the subject. The technological process incurs the fragmentation of patient experience and clinical diagnosis in ‘an increasing alienation between doctor and patient’ (Reiser 1990: x), further distancing one’s own lived embodiment from the body-as-image. Technical instrumentation fragments the body into specific sites of disorder – rather than generating wider, holistic knowledge – in the process of diagnosis. X-rays emerged within a wider context of an expanded visual field; the 1870s witnessed inventions that rendered the body transparent through positioning intense electric illumination within the body to render the skin a quasi-X-ray surface. The design of these ‘scopes’ reflected the specific bodily forms required for illumination. Although some medical practitioners raised objections to the new techniques, this did not ‘undermine the widely held belief within medicine that the most significant advances in diagnosis would come from new ways of visualizing pathology’ (Reiser 1990: 56). Indeed, photographic evidence reinforced and enhanced this belief. An 1859 article, ‘Photography in Medical Science’, published in the foremost medical journal The Lancet, described photography as the ‘art of truth’. Medical attitudes perceived this technique as providing objective, observable evidence that would transform diagnosis. As photographic technology developed – and formerly elaborate preparation and exposure times became more practical – it became an increasingly common technique through the 1890s. Figure 11.3 shows how the ‘fluoroscope’, a quasi-cinematic projection of radiation upon a fluorescent screen, even eliminated the prolonged photographic process involved in using X-ray plates by providing real-time imaging. The potential medical benefits of the invisible rays were apparent to anyone who witnessed the display of bodily interiority. It is understandable, in the new age of technologically expanded vision, that these invisible forces might have helped to combat fears around things such as the newly discovered pathogens evidenced by microphotographic developments. However, through its revelation of bodily interiority, the X-ray also created the unheimlich image of a living skeleton. The iconography of this specific form is, of course, the gothic figure of death. Figure 11.4, featured in Life magazine just weeks after the discovery of X-rays, evidences an immediate connection between the body and mortality; day becomes night and the cheery farmer becomes a doppelgänger in the form of a grim reaper, replete with scythe for harvesting life. As Cartwright proposes, ‘the X-ray is both gothic and modernist’ (1995: 107); hence Anne

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Figure 11.3  ‘An X-ray shadow picture’, Popular Electricity in Plain English magazine, May 1909.

Figure 11.4  Illustration from Life magazine, February 1896.

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Berthe Röntgen’s exclamation that the X-ray image foretold her death. Hopes for the therapeutic use of X-rays were increasingly tempered by emerging scientific evidence and media reports of the deleterious relationship between X-radiation and the human body. Matthew Lavine notes that the ‘hazards that x-radiation presented provided an early and perennial stream of newspaper stories . . . For all the general exuberance in the press towards the potential of x-rays, newspapers also made clear that the same rays could burn, maim, or kill’ (Lavine 2012: 596–7). Indeed, Thomas Edison embodies such ambivalence; his entrepreneurial exuberance was replaced by growing reluctance after his own illnesses. Following the horrific, prolonged, bodily degeneration of his assistant Clarence Dally, Edison would infamously declare in 1903, ‘Don’t talk to me about X-rays . . . I am afraid of them’ (quoted in Lavine 2012: 596).

Hearts of Darkness and Mists of Flesh The X-ray’s ability to provide penetrative vision, render bodies transparent and transform interior structure into an exterior surface was an important and pervasive metaphor around the turn of the twentieth century, not least in the work of Joseph Conrad. Conceptual metaphors involving skin, bone, transparency and identity are embedded in Conrad’s X-ray character diagnoses through recurring tropes of light, technology and the body. Indeed, Conrad had a prior interest in, and direct experience of, X-rays. The writer Neil Munro recounted, in his later pseudonymous ‘Random Reminiscences’ newspaper column, a dinner in September 1898 that included himself, Conrad and John MacIntyre, the medical X-ray pioneer who had established the Glasgow Royal Infirmary’s X-ray department. Munro described the event wherein ‘all the wizardry of Röntgen rays were [sic] turned on’ (1990: 94) as he was subjected to X-rays whilst Conrad and MacIntyre observed his ribs, backbone and ‘the more opaque portions of my viscera’. Munro also recalled having ‘our hands X-rayed’ – presumably ‘our’ included Conrad’s own hand – before receiving photographic images hours later. Conrad’s own letter to Edward Garnett in September 1898 corroborates these events, describing a conversation that ranged from the important role of X-rays in medicine to a discussion of the secrets of the universe and ‘the nonexistence of [. . .] matter’ (1928: 143). Conrad remarked upon Munro’s X-ray: ‘we contemplated his backbone and his ribs. The rest of that promising youth was too diaphanous to be visible’ (1928: 143). This fascination with the literal and metaphorical powers of X-rays is apparent in Heart of Darkness, which Conrad began writing in December 1898, just two months after his evening with Munro and MacIntyre. There is a clear connection between Conrad’s experience of Munro’s X-ray, of his ‘backbone’, ‘ribs’ and ‘diaphanous body’, and the perceptions of the narrator Marlow. For example, the physical, bodily description of enslaved, chained Africans notes their ‘every rib, the joints of their limbs [. . .] like knots in a rope’ (1995: 15). As Marlow continues his journey into the darkness, the environment’s geology becomes biomorphic, in line with what Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère identifies as a widespread ‘land-as-body analogy’ (2004: 188). Marlow conflates the structure of a sandbank in shallow water with the human skeletal structure beneath the skin’s veil: ‘exactly as a man’s backbone is seen running down the middle of his back under the skin’ (1995: 43). Prior to Marlow’s encounter with Kurtz, the narrative’s antagonist, he perceives at a distance Kurtz’s gothic, skeletal figure, an ‘atrocious phantom’, an ‘apparition’ with ‘eyes . . . shining darkly in its bony head’

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(1995: 59). Marlow describes Kurtz’s body with striking similarity to an X-ray’s penetration and uncovering of the skin and flesh to reveal a skeleton: His covering had fallen off, and his body emerged from it pitiful and appalling as from a winding-sheet. I could see the cage of his ribs all astir, the bones of his arm waving. It was as though an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had been shaking its hand with menaces at a motionless crowd of men made of dark and glittering bronze. (Conrad 1995: 59) Again, protruding ribs and presence of bone come to the fore, resembling the gothic, deathly image of the X-ray. As with MacIntyre’s image of Munro, although the skeleton is present, the rest of what makes someone human is absent. Whilst Conrad described Munro’s image as ‘too diaphanous to be visible’, Marlow describes Kurtz as ‘hollow at the core’ (1995: 58); like the X-ray, Kurtz’s inhumanity reveals a ‘heart of darkness’. Conrad’s metaphors do not just articulate different ways of thinking and observing in response to a new visual technology; in Conrad’s treatment, X-ray technology itself is a metonym for rendering transparent the brutality of colonialism and the effects upon its victims. Conrad describes Kurtz’s transformation of native African bodies into living corpses resembling X-rays; just as the process of X-rays penetrates and pervades bodies – destroying them both physically through radiation and conceptually as a fragmented image – so European imperialism diminishes the native body into bones bound by chains. The X-ray, as a metaphor of truth and enlightenment, is also turned in on itself, as through this operation Marlow’s ‘X-ray vision’ also reveals the imperialist motives of ‘hollow’ officials and ‘shadow’ men, and he ‘see[s] through’ the civilising mission and the ‘vacuity of colonial discourse’ (Hennard Dutheil 2004: 192). Whilst the ‘heart’ is often represented as a ‘core’, it is also an organic pulse, an alive, beating condition that is used to describe the jungle. However, Kurtz himself can be understood as the story’s heart of darkness, underlying his status as a white European male shining a ‘civilising’ colonial light. Indeed, Conrad’s narrative is counter to the enlightenment shone upon Africa by European male voyages such as Henry Morton Stanley’s exploration of Africa. Stanley’s search for David Livingston continued to popularise this metaphor in his accounts Through the Dark Continent (1878) and In Darkest Africa (1890). Conrad’s recurring metaphors of body and light, vision and knowledge, surface and depth, solidity and vacuity all suggest how X-ray technology provided an apposite metonym; the X-ray was a technology of clarity and truth, but is used here to perceive the problematic ideological histories and destructive practices inherent within colonial power. Conrad was not the only writer to consider X-rays within their work. Figures such as Jack London, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann and H. G. Wells, among others, were all influenced by this new technology. Woolf’s writing was influenced by cinema, photography and a broader notion of visual culture, including X-rays. Margaret Humm proposes that the incorporation of the new capacities for revelation and representation created by a visual culture obsessed with new visual technologies such as photography, stereoscope, X-rays and cinema was fundamental to Woolf’s modernism: ‘Woolf concerns herself both with visible and “invisible” vision, with what contemporary physics was recognising in Einstein’s theories of space

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time, as kinesis, that is the flow of differing perspectives’ (2010: 214, 215). In a diary entry on 9 January 1897, written at the age of fourteen, Woolf describes accidentally attending a lecture and live demonstration of ‘Rontgen [sic] Rays’ (Woolf 1990: 9, see also Whitworth 2001a and 2001b). Woolf later incorporated direct reference to X-rays in her 1922 review of Percy Lubbock’s literary criticism, The Craft of Fiction: Mr Lubbock applies his Röntgen rays. The voluminous lady submits to examination. The flesh, the finery, even the smile and witchery, together with the umbrellas and brown paper parcels which she has collected on her long and toilsome journey, dissolve and disappear; the skeleton alone remains. It is surprising. It is even momentarily shocking. Our old familiar friend has vanished. But, after all, there is something satisfactory in bone – one can grasp it. (Woolf 1986: 341) Woolf describes Lubbock’s approach almost as male violence upon a submissive female body. For Michael Whitworth, Woolf’s reference to the X-ray here is a ‘metaphor for reductiveness’ (2001b: 153). Unlike Conrad’s portrayal of the body as a hollow shell for an absent soul, Woolf appears to find comfort, something ‘satisfactory’, in the permanence of material solidity following the reductive process (see also Crossland 2014). Criticism and ‘re-reading’ enact a process of stripping to reveal something essential as the (male) X-ray becomes a metaphor for revealing a (female) novel’s structure. Later, in To the Lighthouse (1927), Woolf draws upon X-rays to penetrate inner motives behind the thin façade of behavioural etiquette at a social gathering. Woolf writes of Lily Briscoe’s perception – ‘as in an X-ray photograph’ – of Charles Tansley’s discomfort as his tense, restless ribs and bones become a symptom of his desire to impress ‘lying dark in the mist of his flesh’. Lily then reflects upon behavioural social codes that compel her to provide an opportunity for which a man ‘may expose and relieve the thigh bones, the ribs, of his vanity, of his urgent desire to assert himself’ (Woolf 2004: 107). In distinction to Conrad’s metaphor of the X-ray as a measure of a person’s solidity, contrasting solid backbones of men of character to those merely hollow physical husks, Woolf perceives a permanence in one’s skeletal deportment, even if it is made uncomfortable by social behaviour. Both writers problematise the very binary concepts of exterior and interior created through the X-ray by entangling one’s inner and outer being; each dimension, inside and outside, is symptomatic of the other and fundamentally entwined. The X-ray not only reveals human interiority, but also serves as a metaphor to dissect social and political behaviours, with these examples laying bare the violent impositions of colonialism and patriarchy alike.

(De)Materialised Bodies The relationships between interior and exterior, surface and depth, movement and perspective were of profound interest not only to modernist novelists but also to the European artistic avant-gardes. They incorporated their fascination with X-rays into a wider set of influences concerning the visual articulation of non-perceptible matter and forces influenced by the modern world such as new speeds of travel, electricity, prosthetically expanded vision, non-Euclidean and n-dimensional geometries and notions of the ‘fourth dimension’. These forces reflected ‘modern’ experience and reality, with artists engaged in rethinking and reconfiguring the terms of visual representation.

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Indeed, the long-established representational structure of three-dimensional perspective could no longer sustain and articulate such a new, dynamic, modern world. The French Puteaux group of artists and thinkers – including the painters Fernand Léger, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Francis Picabia and František Kupka, and writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire – explored a range of modern concepts across philosophy, literature, technology, science, art and mathematics. Many ideas were nourished by an increase of books, journals, magazines and newspaper articles, and translations publishing the latest, radical, modern thinking (see Henderson 1983). The revelation of X-radiation was received within a larger context of profound cultural change (see Kern 2003) that inspired new visual articulations of transformed concepts of space, time, form, objecthood, energy and matter. The avant-garde’s artistic experiments referred to processes of penetration, duration, movement and recomposition of objects, spaces and people to encode their ‘reality’ according to a different order. Cubism, a term advanced by Apollinaire and consisting broadly of the Puteaux artists and Montmartre painters such as Picasso and Georges Braque, presented a radical new vision by instituting a process of rupturing pictorial form and re-presenting objects. The abandonment of linear perspective and the integration of multiple perspectives through different interconnected, semi-opaque planes embodied the concept of dynamic ‘becoming’, inspired by the philosophy of Henri Bergson, in the articulation of an object whereby its structure was an expression of its relationship to temporality and an emanation of its interiority. Kevles insists that ‘The first to portray the transparency and simultaneity of seeing through the body were the cubists’ (1997: 124). The Italian Futurists were also inspired by the increasing dissemination of new ideas (see Kern 2003; Lista 2001). Umberto Boccioni’s 1910 ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting’ addressed the need for representation to embody modern forces and an energistic interconnectivity between states of matter: ‘Our bodies penetrate the sofas upon which we sit, and the sofas penetrate our bodies. The motor bus rushes into the houses which it passes, and in their turn the houses throw themselves upon the motor bus and are blended with it’ (Boccioni 1968a: 290). The Futurists disavowed the permanence and ‘opacity’ of objects and figures in the new age of technological modernity: ‘Why should we forget in our creations the doubled power of our sight, capable of giving results analogous to those of x-rays?’ (1968a: 290). The new culture of vision and speed – from the X-ray to the motorcar – required new forms of visual encoding. Indeed, the Futurists perceived a radical deanthropocentrism occurring in the realisation of the profound limitations of human perceptual faculties and a destabilisation of their presupposed priority over perceptual reality: ‘Our renovated consciousness does not permit us to look upon man as the centre of universal life’ (1968a: 290). Futurist painters experimented with a set of ideas, supported by the concept of X-rays, in articulating how ‘movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies’ (1968a: 293) and how a two-dimensional surface could synthesise concepts of force, dynamism and Bergsonian durée. Umberto Boccioni’s writing referenced X-rays, and he used sculpture – traditionally a static medium – to express dynamic movement in his Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) through a synthesis of Bergsonian concepts of ‘relative’ and ‘absolute’ time. Boccioni’s prior sculpture, Development of a Bottle in Space (1912) (Figure 11.5), exposes the bottle’s interior structure, in ‘an explicit affirmation of positive negative space’ (Kern 2003: 159). The sculpture moves

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Figure 11.5  Umberto Boccioni, Development of a Bottle in Space, 1912. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Lydia Winston Malbin, 1989.

beyond the surface in order to penetrate its interiority; the internal curvature and rotation of the bottle become fundamental to its exterior representation. The result is a synthesis of material and temporal conditions defining the bottle’s status as an object. Resembling Woolf’s and Conrad’s synthetic vision of interior core and exterior surface, the bottle is simultaneously solid and hollow, static and rotating. Boccioni’s ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture’ of 1912 described an aspiration for sculpture to develop as Futurist painting had – through the synthetic interpenetration of planes that interconnect matter and states of being. He wrote, ‘Futurist painting has overcome this conception of rhythmic continuity of the lines in a human figure and of the figure’s isolation from its background and from its INVISIBLE INVOLVING SPACE’ (Boccioni 1968b: 302). The potential role that X-ray images had in the development of Boccioni’s notion that ‘the sculpture will contain within itself the architectural elements’ (Boccioni 1968b: 302) is significant. His conclusion – ‘We proclaim that sculpture is based on the abstract reconstruction of the planes and volumes that determine the forms, not their figurative value’ (Boccioni 1968b: 303) – summarises how the very process should become the form, for sculpture inherently to incorporate a dimension of Bergsonian temporality and the object’s own ‘becoming’. As Rosalind Krauss writes on Development of a Bottle in Space, ‘it not only treats the viewer as a consciousness capable of encompassing the object’s exterior in a single instant but it also guarantees the unity and clarity of this knowledge by giving him access to the object’s very core’ (1981: 45). Krauss understands Boccioni’s reference to X-ray vision in the ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting’ as a ‘turn to science to peel away the mute surfaces of things that make them unintelligible’ (1981: 46). We can further understand Boccioni’s approach by examining the resemblances to X-rays in the arcing structures of his drawing Table + Bottle + House (1912) (Figure 11.6). Futurism’s explorations in synthesising form and temporality into visual representation initially extended to photography and had briefly concerned Futurism’s foremost artists – Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini. However, the medium was ultimately rejected as antithetical to Futurist aspirations

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Figure 11.6  Umberto Boccioni, Table + Bottle + House, 1912. Pencil on paper. Civico Gabinetto dei Desegni, Castello Sforzesco, Milan. (see Lista 2001). As the X-ray was an instrument of revelation, so photography initially promised similar possibilities. Giovanni Lista writes: By translating the infrasensorial and metaperceptive dimensions for the first time, by transfixing the transience or invisibility of the interaction between matter and energy, thereby revealing the unconscious dimension of the gaze, photography seemed to penetrate the very mystery of life. (2001: 10) Futurism’s most active photographic practitioner, Anton Giulio Bragaglia, developed a theory of ‘Photodynamism’ to accompany Filippo Tomaso Marinetti’s ‘free-verse dynamism’, Boccioni’s ‘pictorial dynamism’ and Francesco Ballila Pratella’s ‘musical dynamism’ (Lista 2001: 21). Bragaglia was influenced by different sources, including Bergsonian philosophy, Étienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotography, X-ray technology and parascientific photography (see Lista 2001). Bragaglia would have been aware of contemporaneous experiments in the Italian photographic journals Il Dilettante di Fotografia and Il Progresso Fotografico. They featured images of ‘Roentgen rays’ alongside the parascientific – the ‘photography of thought’, spirit and ectoplasmic photography – and the more legitimate scientific work of Ernst Mach’s dynamography, Marey’s chronophotography, and microphotography (Lista 2001: 9). It is important to consider that the distinction between ‘legitimate’ and spurious forms of photographic innovations, and the revelations made possible by their images, was neither clear nor established, given photography’s own nascent development and the wider cultural fascination for hitherto concealed dimensions of

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perception. Indeed, there are numerous examples of scientists and engineers engaged in both paranormal and parascientific research. One particularly apposite example here is the attempts by British scientist William Crookes – whose ‘Crookes tube’ was a prerequisite for discovering X-rays – to validate paranormal activity scientifically and objectively; he concluded that ‘Psychic Force’, emanating from the ‘soul or mind’ (1874: 23), had an objective existence. Exploring the limits of a technology was, understandably, considerably attractive within the scientific community; Gunning notes that spiritualist ideas actually encountered greater resistance and objection from religious organisations than from scientists and rationalists engaged in its research (2008: 62). The X-ray existed within this ambivalent cultural and artistic context, at an intersection between reality and metareality, science and parascience. Indeed, other sorts of ‘rays’ were ‘discovered’ that similarly entwined rationality and the mysterious. French Commandant Louis Darget developed ‘thought photography’, capturing invisible rays projected from the human soul. He claimed this proved the existence of ‘V-rays’ (‘V’ for ‘vital’). This was contemporaneous with French physicist Prosper-René Blondlot’s disproven 1903 claims around radioactive ‘N-rays’ (‘N’ for Nancy University). Dr Hippolyte Baraduc, neurologist at the renowned Parisian hospital La Salpêtrière, had made photographic ‘studies’ of the soul, and had been influenced by Baron Carl von Reichenbach’s concept of ‘Od-rays’ (after ‘Odic force’, referencing the Norse God Odin). ‘Discoveries’ of such invisible forces demonstrated an entanglement between scientific, parascientific, amateur, spiritualist and public spheres. This clear desire to go beyond the visible, to investigate the immaterial, was reflected in Futurist concerns with synthetic concepts of exterior and interior, absolute and relative. For Bragaglia, his concept of ‘Photodynamism’ was inspired by, and incorporated, such diverse influences. The influence of X-rays upon the ‘Orphism’ of František Kupka and Marcel Duchamp has been studied in detail by Linda Henderson (1998) and Virginia Spate (1979). The appellation ‘Orphism’ was coined by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who attempted to cluster several painters into a distinct facet of Cubism. Like the Italian Futurists, Kupka and Duchamp were deeply inspired by new imperceptible dynamic forces and energies. Both artists attended the Puteaux group meetings on contemporary science, literature and philosophy, where, as Spate writes, there was an ‘artistic transformation [following] the scientific and technological discoveries which were creating a new awareness of the physical world’ (1979: 23). The X-ray directly inspired a number of those artists. For example, Francis Picabia’s Mechanical Expression Seen Through Our Own Mechanical Expression (1913) – anticipating his later ‘mechanomorphs’ that hybridised the human body and industrial machine – refigured the film star and dancer Stacia Napierkowska as a machine, consisting in part of an X-ray-emitting Crookes tube. Picabia’s figure is a construction of machine sexuality, exhibitionism and energy. However, Picabia’s imagery is strikingly different from that of Kupka, a practising spiritualist and Theosophist. Kupka was a Czech painter living in Puteaux and sought to create non-representational (abstract) art to articulate ‘soul impressions’ (Spate 1979: 12) through treatment of form, line and colour. His description of the artist’s mind used the metaphor of ‘ultrasensitive film, capable of seeing even the unknown worlds of which the rhythms would seem incomprehensible to us’ (Kevles 1997: 127). Kupka’s interest in X-rays was supported by his studies of biology, physiology and neurology at the Sorbonne whilst he ‘encountered numerous references to x rays [sic] and radioactivity in occult

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literature in this period’ (Henderson 1988: 328), such as in the Theosophical works of Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater. Paintings such as The Dream (1909) and Planes by Colours, Large Nude (1909–10) articulate Kupka’s ideas, whilst his notebook reveals a Kantian concern with ‘perception of matter under its exterior form [and] . . . perception of the form in itself’ (Henderson 1988: 329). Marcel Duchamp’s famous Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) (Figure 11.7) developed the concern between interior thought and exterior action in his 1910 Portrait of Chess Players, whilst unfolding from an intersection of further converging modern influences. Duchamp himself cited the impact of Cubism, Marey’s stroboscopic chronophotography and the poetry of Jules Laforgue and Stéphane Mallarmé (see Duchamp and Cabanne 1979: 30–4). Duchamp recounted how he made illustrations for Laforgue’s poetry and derived the idea for Nude Descending from Encore à cet astre (Sweeney 1946: 19; see also Steefel 1976). Laforgue’s significance may have unfolded from his technique of combining disparate content through a unifying rhyming form, together with ascribing living features to inanimate objects (certainly observable in Picabia). Duchamp was also influenced by cinema, had seen Futurist depictions of movement, knew of Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering photographic studies and had been attached to the Puteaux Cubist group (Sweeney 1946: 19–20). Linda Henderson also argues that Nude Descending was significantly influenced by the X-ray and chronophotographic work of Albert Londe, upon which Professor of Anatomy Paul Richer developed anatomical diagrams. Richer published his schematic, simplified figures in Physiologie artistique de l’homme en mouvement (1895); in the image ‘Deux doubles pas successifs de la descente d’un escalier’, Richer’s drawn figure descends two steps in nine layered, successive positions. For Henderson, ‘Richer’s diagram is almost the prototype for Duchamp’s composition’ (1988: 332). Duchamp’s painting incorporates a similar sense of planar rotation but moves beyond the schematic to imbricate interior and exterior, rhythm and movement, to extract temporal and spatial essence. According to Henderson, Duchamp created a ‘painterly equivalent to the transparent and fluid reality suggested by x rays’ (1988: 336). Within the cultural anxiety over X-ray invasiveness, Duchamp desexualised his nude into something resembling mechanical form, whilst Picabia explored a machine ‘erotics’ with its parts, orifices, connections and biomorphic elements. Whilst Duchamp and Picabia became increasingly closer in their shared concern for imagining human-machine assemblages, Duchamp’s Nude articulated something more akin to Futurism’s interest in X-rays: penetrating exterior surfaces to reveal the interior structures upon which figures and forms unfold. The visual technologies of the X-ray, cinema and chronophotography inspired new modes of artistic figuration that had been nourished by new, modern ideas concerning duration, dynamism, interconnectivity and dimensionality. The X-ray was a profoundly intermedial technology; the intangibility of radiation required a medium through which to manifest its presence. Indeed, the very condition of the X-ray’s discovery was contingent upon an accidental photographic process. As such, the X-ray was rapidly harnessed by medical and scientific communities, commercial enterprises and entertainment entrepreneurs – all purchasing equipment for different contexts and audiences. X-rays also prompted significant modernist innovations. For example, the influence of Conrad’s direct participation in an X-ray experiment can be traced in Heart of Darkness, where Marlow’s gothic X-ray perceptions transform the landscape and penetrate the surfaces of its phantom figures. In contrast, Duchamp was inspired through a wider, more indirect set of X-rays’ intermedial entanglements – from the painterly

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Figure 11.7  Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912. Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021.

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innovations of his contemporaries, to photographic revelations, poetic experimentation and medical research. The forms that X-rays took were clearly both technical and metaphorical. As the discovery of X-rays was concurrent with the Lumières’ first cinematic projection and Marconi’s wireless communication, so it also occurred in the same year as the publication of works such as H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria. Both foundational works, of science fiction and psychoanalysis respectively, they also articulated something fantastic and disturbing beyond the visible. The duality inherent within the exterior and interior, surface and repressed, is inherent in the X-ray: visual media gave it spectacular presence whilst that very visibility generated a hauntological spectre within modernism. Within these contexts and through such works, Röntgen’s discovery provided modernity’s own metaphoric figure from which to ‘know thyself’; the skeletons that had once occupied anatomical theatres waving their banners proclaiming ‘Nosce te ipsum’(‘Know thyself’) could be replaced by ubiquitous, photographic images of human interiority, first realised through Anne Berthe Röntgen’s hand.

Works Cited Boccioni, Umberto (1968a), ‘Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto (1910)’, in Theories of Modern Art, ed. H. Chipp. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, pp. 289–93. Boccioni, Umberto (1968b), ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture (1912)’, in Theories of Modern Art, ed. H. Chipp. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press’, pp. 298–304. Busch, Uwe (2017), ‘Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen: The Discovery of X-Rays and the Creation of a New Medical Profession’, in Handbook of X-Ray Imaging: Physics and Technology, ed. P. Russo. Boca Raton. London. New York: CRC Press, pp. 327–30. Cartwright, Lisa (1995), Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Conrad, Joseph (1928), ‘Letter to Edward Garnett, 29 September 1898’, in Letters from Joseph Conrad 1895–1924, ed. E. Garnett. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Conrad, Joseph (1995), Heart of Darkness and Other Stories. Ware: Wordsworth Editions. Crookes, William (1874), ‘Enquiry into the Phenomena Called Spiritual’, Quarterly Journal of Science, January, pp. 3–23. Crossland, Rachel (2014), ‘Exposing the Bones of Desire: Virginia Woolf’s X-ray Visions’, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, 85, Spring, pp. 18–20. Duchamp, Marcel and Pierre Cabanne (1979), Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. R. Padgett. London: Da Capo Press. Glasser, Otto (1993), Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen and the Early History of the Roentgen Rays. San Franciso: Norman Publishing. Gunning, Tom (2008), ‘Invisible Worlds, Visible Media’, in Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840–1900, ed. C. Keller. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp. 52–65. Henderson, L. D. (1983), The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Henderson, L. D. (1988), ‘X Rays and the Quest for Invisible Reality in the Art of Kupka, Duchamp, and the Cubists’, Art Journal, 47: 4, pp. 323–40. Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, Martine (2004), ‘Body Politics: Conrad’s Anatomy of Empire in “Heart of Darkness”’, Conradiana, 36: 3, pp. 185–205.

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Humm, Maggie (2010), ‘Virginia Woolf and Visual Culture’, in The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (Second Edition), ed. S. Sullers, pp. 214–30. Kern, Stephen (2003), The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. Kevles, Bettyann (1997), Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Century. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Krauss, Rosalind (1981), Passages in Modern Sculpture. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press. Lavine, Matthew (2012), ‘The Early Clinical X-Ray in the United States: Patient Experiences and Public Perceptions’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 67: 4, pp. 587–625. Lista, Giovanni (2001), Futurism and Photography. London: Merrell. Munro, Neil (1990), ‘Conrad’s X-Ray’, in Joseph Conrad: Interviews and Recollections, ed. M. Ray. Iowa: University of Iowa Press. Natale, Simone (2011), ‘The Invisible Made Visible: X-rays as Attraction and Visual Medium at the End of the Nineteenth Century’, Media History, 17: 4, pp. 345–58. ‘Photography in Medical Science’ (1859), The Lancet, 22 January, p. 89. Reiser, Stanley Joel (1990), Medicine and the Reign of Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spate, Virginia (1979), Orphism: The Evolution of Non-Figurative Painting in Paris 1910–1914. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Steefel, Lawrence D. (1976), ‘Marcel Duchamp’s “Encore à Cet Astre”: A New Look’, Art Journal, 36: 1, Autumn, pp. 23–30. Sweeney, James Johnson (1946), The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, VIII: 4–5. Thomas, Adrian (2017), ‘History of Radiology’, in Handbook of X-Ray Imaging: Physics and Technology, ed. P. Russo. London and New York: CRC Press, pp. 331–54. Tuniz, Claudio (2012), Radioactivity: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whitworth, Michael (2001a), Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whitworth, Michael (2001b), ‘Porous Objects: Self, Community, and the Nature of Matter’, in Virginia Woolf Out of Bounds: Selected Papers from the Tenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, ed. J. Berman and J. Goldman. New York: Pace University Press, pp. 151–6. Woolf, Virginia (1986), ‘On Re-reading Novels’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1919–1924, ed. A. McNeillie. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 336–46. Woolf, Virginia (1990), A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897–1909, ed. M. A. Leaska. London: Hogarth Press, 1990. Woolf, Virginia (2004), To the Lighthouse. London: Collector’s Library.

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12 Cinema: Notes on Germaine Dulac’s ‘Integral Cinema’, Form and Spirit Felicity Gee

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riting about cinematography in the 1920s and 1930s involved an extraordinary, celestial vocabulary, which both derived and departed from scientific and philosophical ideas of the previous century.1 Prior to the invention of cinema, scientists, photographers, astronomers, meteorologists and psychoanalysts of the midnineteenth century debated the potential wonders (and dangers) of seeing at a lesser or greater speed than one-tenth of a second, the unit of ‘microtime’ then believed to represent the standard time a human being took to react to external stimuli.2 Consequently, ‘[n]ew arrangements between keys, bodies, wires, clocks, texts, images, and screens were set in place to understand this moment and solve the problems it posed’ (Canales 2009: 217). The Transit of Venus (which took place in 1874 and 1882), lightning storms, electrical sparks, and solar and lunar events were some of the camera’s early muses. These natural and man-made phenomena occurred at a pace or velocity, a distance or scale, that required the focal range and mobility of early cinematographic technologies. Until the arrival of the Lumière cinematographic camera in 1895, advances in cinematography were often battles fought in laboratories and observatories, but these advances also presented philosophical conundrums. Frances Guerin argues that ‘Technologies such as electrical light and cinema – with their impetus toward instantaneity, fragmentation and ephemerality – arguably frustrate the totalities and hinder the reconciliation between the world of things and that of the spiritual in technological modernity’ (Guerin 2005: 20). As technologies pushed humans to attempt ever more accurate recordings of the exterior world, the unreliability of the observer, and the discrepancy between individual reactions to events and memories of them, became clearer, as did categorical factors such racial and ethnic discrimination based on an assumed biological determinism. The quest for the technological expansion of human ocular and neurological faculties necessarily invoked a rethinking ‘of basic conceptions of the self [. . .] the difference between subjectivity and objectivity. [. . .The camera] was used to investigate what was distinctly personal and individual about particular observations and about the testimony of these observations’ (Canales 2009: 215). For example, artist–filmmakers of the early twentieth century were entranced by cinematography’s potential to capture sensory impressions, rather than its ability to augment verisimilitude and improve representational accuracy: ‘If instruments decompose motion and explore the infinitesimal in nature,’ wrote experimental filmmaker Germaine Dulac in 1928, ‘it is to show us visually the dramas or beauties that our eye, a powerless lens, cannot perceive’ (Dulac 2018: Le Rouge et le Noir (July 1928)).

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This chapter is concerned with the various ways in which a new affective and philosophical vocabulary emerged through experiments in cinematic language across the world. Most of the examples I draw upon are from the work of avant-garde filmmakers and artists in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, but the impact of cinema in the early twentieth century is world-wide, and illustrative of intellectual and economic flows across sometimes vastly unequal and difficult geopolitical boundaries. While the Third Cinema movement did not emerge in Latin America until the 1960s, for example, it took inspiration from the European avant-gardes of the century’s early decades (including Soviet montage, Italian neo-realism, French surrealism and documentary). Thanks to individuals lugging canisters home from their travels, 35mm film reels often circulated abroad; these films included Man Ray’s L’Étoile de mer (The Sea Star, 1928) and Dulac’s much-discussed Surrealist work La Coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman, 1927; scenario by Antonin Artaud), which reached Japan from France in this manner and were screened at small public gatherings (Nada 1992). Critical reviews also proved transformative in disseminating new trends and opinions beyond Europe. For example, Cuban novelist and musicologist Alejo Carpentier, exiled in Paris from 1928 to 1939, wrote reviews for viewers in Latin America who did not yet have access to the range of films that he saw at the Vieux Colombier cinema in Montparnasse (see Gee 2021). Typical of the balance of cultural specificity and international exchange, and discussed later in this chapter, are the work of Japanese filmmaker Kinugasa Teinosuke and the writing of Greek filmmaker Ado (Adonis) Kyrou, which, while created in dialogue with the European avant-garde, clearly articulate histories and traditions through a regional, socio-political lens. In another sign of the internationalist potential of interwar cinema, the 1920s and 1930s saw an increase in polysemic film criticism that attacked racism in Hollywood and elsewhere. Anna Everett offers an overview of this critical trend: The preponderance of the literature bifurcates along familiar lines in African American political thought, that duality of accommodation and radicalism. Along the accommodationist axis are criticism and commentary concerned with effecting a progressive reform of Hollywood in matters of race and representation; along the radical line are those critiques defined by a politics of opposition to dominant filmmaking practices and their attendant bourgeois ideologies. (Everett 2001: 179–80) In 1929, the film periodical Close-Up (1927–33) – a little magazine founded in Switzerland and later housed in the UK, edited by poet and novelist Winifred Bryher and Kenneth Macpherson – published a special issue on race to promote better and more sophisticated cinematic representation of Black subjects that might arrive with the coming of sound. Harry A. Potamkin’s ‘The Aframerican Cinema’ makes some racist missteps but was nevertheless an earnest attempt to address discrimination in the industry: The cinema, through its workers, has been content to remain ignorant. It might have saved itself a great deal of trouble and many failures and much time had he [sic] studied the experience of the other arts. Well, what can the negro cinema learn from The White Man’s Negro and The Black Man’s Negro in art, in literature, in theatre?’ (1929: 5.2; 1998: 66)

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Even the most intellectually bourgeois or avant-garde film magazines took on political subjects and educational matters alongside articles on film as a serious art form. For some cinéphiles, such as Dulac, cinema seemed a miraculous uniting force: The films of each country bear their stamp of origin [. . .] but beyond local customs, spiritual and social internationalism shines through. Cinema is the marvelous Volapük3 and, by being a universal language, creates affection and understanding between peoples. (Dulac 2018: ‘The Meaning of Cinema’ (December 1931)) This chapter considers the revelatory potential of film as it was perceived by artists and writers of the time through their often effusive philosophical and experimental prose. What is so striking in these examples of early twentieth-century cinema and cinematic writing is how modernist cinema inspired a wealth of approaches to filmmaking, including essayistic and philosophical approaches to montage, thereby indexing the flux and instability of the period. And what is also clear is that the line between practice and theory is, like the line between fantasy and reality, a permeable boundary. As such, we find ideas bridging Romanticism (awe at the natural world; metaphysics; and emotionality) and modernity (the cinematic apparatus as augmenter of reality; a perceived waning of human agency; and questions of the non-anthropocentric). A medium capable of expressing everything from inner thought to exterior everydayness in a synaesthetic rush of new combinations and juxtapositions, the moving image was by turns derided – as merely mimetic, ‘an industry governed by sordid market forces incapable of distinguishing a work of the mind from a sack of flour’ (Péret 2000 [1951]: 59) – and extolled: ‘Cinema will be able to construct the synthesis-temple of our intense inner life, in the heavens that its new strength will illumine and “illustrate” by means of the incomparable findings of Science’ (Canudo 1993 [1923]: 293–4). Navigating the vast constellations of schools, movements and industrial centres of interwar cinema, this chapter draws on the work of French filmmaker, producer and critic Germaine Dulac to thread these key concepts and ideas together. Dulac, one of few female filmmakers of the modernist avant-garde, made a significant contribution to film-philosophy. Resolutely detailed in her notes, she eschewed improvisation and focused on the detail of experience, specifically of women’s boredom, habitual movements, domesticity and labour, centring, as Dulac scholar Tami Williams identifies, female desire and fear. Her counter-hegemonic observations necessitated a certain opacity of style in the male-dominated and oft-conservative milieux of filmmaking and journalism: ‘Dulac’s use of a less direct, cumulative system of symbolist association supported a more subversive and liberating discourse’ (Williams 2014: 89). Her lectures and film criticism further underline a philosophical approach to human interiority and phenomenological experience.

Movement and the Senses: Dulac and Stein Dulac was excited about film’s potential to bring media as well as the senses into communication: In listening to the second Arabesque of Debussy, [. . .] I had the completely personal vision of the earth turning, rejuvenated by the sun, a vision of flowers, of sap, of

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fountains of water rising and falling back, of joy, of rebirth, of physical well-being. I chose the visual rhythms to compose a ‘film ballet’ made from the very material of the Seventh Art, in other words, of motion, of light, of form, of connections. Would I claim that ‘This is the entirety of cinema?’ No. Better than that: it is a possibility of cinema. (2018: ‘Within Its Visual Frame Cinema Has No Limits’ (9 May 1931)) She writes here of her film Étude cinégraphique sur une Arabesque (aka Arabesques) (1929), a dance in light combining linear patterns of foliage and figural composition, woven in rhythmic, interlacing lines of the decorative Baroque style from which it takes its title. The spiritual art of Islamic cultures is set in motion with inspiration from Claude Debussy’s impressionistic Baroque and the graceful poise of ballet dancers. An arabesque typically slows time in the unfolding of its ornamental, free-form melody. Dulac’s Arabesques celebrates the cycles of routine and the slow beauty of natural forms in her cinematic poetry. Its rhythm has a softer, more harmonious ebb than in the pulsing and spinning of the better-known film Le Ballet mécanique (1924, directed by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy). These rhythmic differences remind us that, in this vibrant period, consensus was rare and transient, as views and movements emerged, clashed and separated. Terms such as ‘pure’, ‘impressionist’, ‘absolute’, ‘photogénie’, ‘Dadaist’ and ‘Surrealist’ find philosophical as well as aesthetic purchase in a dialectics of formal innovation. Accompanying film criticism was frequently experimental and naïvely enthusiastic. Filmmakers also worked as critics, discussing and underlining the aesthetic, philosophical and utopian aims of their medium, often with an undeniable effusiveness. Dulac’s Arabesques (Figures 12.1 and 12.2) and her written reflections on it, emblematise the dialectics of the cinematic avant-garde through a

Figure 12.1  Arabesques, Germaine Dulac, 1929.

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Figure 12.2  Arabesques, Germaine Dulac, 1929. self-reflexive awareness. She combines thoughts on technological experimentation and the politics of the gaze with commentary on the challenges of representing the rhythms of emotion. The choice to foreground women’s bodies, rhythmic association and the role of the senses lends her films an essayistic–feminist style, repeating and returning to affective resonances and motifs. In Dulac’s film-ballet, the viewer is encouraged to fall into the images, and while this visual world may appear discordant or incongruous, the cuts are not. The dissolves and edits are slower than Debussy’s rather frenetic ‘Arabesque No. 2’, but thanks to time-lapse photography, life – the miraculous life of plants, for example – speeds up mechanically. In a lecture given on 17 June 1924, she explains how Distortions, like superimposition, are a way to make imaginary phantasmagoria real. The superimposition comes as a reaction, the lap dissolve as a link, distortion and soft focus as commentary. When recoiling from an emotion, do we see things as they are? Don’t we tend to enlarge or shrink things? (Dulac 2018: ‘The Expressive Processes of Cinematography’ [1924]) Distortion and soft focus, she continues, ‘can bring a whole philosophy to cinema’ – as in the girl dying of hunger in her film Gossette (1923), or her contemporary Jacques Feyder’s Crainquebille (1922), where the titular character’s ‘ingenuous soul’ and inner turmoil are revealed through soft focus (Dulac 2018: ‘Cinematography’ [1924]). Not only is distortion linked to the inconsistency and unreliability of human perception, but in Dulac’s hands it also describes a metamorphosis of things, ideas, that cinematography brings into being. The ‘beautiful dream’ of the avant-garde, in Dulac’s eyes, was to counterbalance the commercial side of cinema, ‘break down barriers, open new paths, and break new ground’ (Dulac 2018: ‘The Avant-Garde Cinema’ [1932]).

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Debussy’s and Dulac’s respective œuvres have been labelled ‘French Impressionist’. In Arabesques this corresponds to a predominant lightness or haziness in the image, a fluidity of shot transitions, and an emphasis on sensation rather than narrative action. Jets and ripples of water are overexposed to lend an ethereal or otherworldly aspect; flowers appear in frames like specimens on contact sheets, seeming to stand in for humans; a seated woman is shot from behind, the succeeding shots apparently emanating from her mind; the weft of a coarse material meets the sharp lines of objects reflected in water. Dulac used effects such as the vignette of an iris, or the blur of overexposure in natural, rather than studio, lighting to contribute to the soft, impressionistic life of objects in motion: Impressionism made the audience consider nature and objects as elements contributing to the action. A shadow, a light, a flower, had first a meaning as a reflection of an inner soul or a situation, then little by little became a necessary addition with their own intrinsic value. We tried hard to make things move and, with the intervention of the science of optics, tried to transform their lines according to the logic of a state of mind. (Dulac 2018: ‘Aesthetics, Obstacles, Integral Cinema’ [1927]) Dulac’s ‘logic’ does not follow a cause-and-effect linearity. This is the logic of things in perpetual metamorphosis, finding parallels in Debussy’s seizure of movement via the decorative Baroque of ‘Arabesque no. 2’, which in its meandering modes and keys seems rather to connote a flutter of butterflies, a circular or spiral poetry in natural movement. Dulac’s version of impressionism is in harmony with Maurice MerleauPonty’s description of Paul Cézanne’s ‘instantaneous perception, without fixed contours, bound together by light and air’ (1964: 11), which similarly attempts to grasp the fleeting. But instead of the painter’s ‘sunlit colours’, which are used to represent sensations derived from the position of objects, Dulac employs a tonal spectrum from the powderiest cloud-white to the inkiest jet-black silhouette. Writing on film in the early twentieth century often overflows with dynamic superlatives. It reaches into the depths of the personal and phenomenological. Poet and novelist H. D.’s wordy reviews for Close-Up accumulate layer upon layer of descriptive fascination: We moved like moths in darkness, we were hypnotized by cross currents and interacting shades of light and darkness and maybe cigarette smoke. Our censors, intellectually off guard, permitted our minds to rest. We sank into this pulse and warmth and were recreated. (1998: 116) There is a sense of freedom in such regenerative abandon, a state appreciated by many artists to similar and divergent ends. Despite admitting to hardly ever watching films, Gertrude Stein was similarly obsessed with form, creating a textual shorthand for her sensory portraits of exterior reality through cinematography’s technical expression of new ontological experience: ‘The business of Art as I tried to explain in Composition as Explanation is to live in the actual present that is the complete actual present, and to completely express that complete actual present’ (Stein 1988: 104–5). If immediacy springs from repetition, and ‘each time the emphasis is different just as the cinema has each time a slightly different thing to make it all be moving’

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(1988: 201), then, Stein believed, the mechanism of film art could act as a metaphor for intense experience. When asked to contribute to Close-Up by Macpherson in 1927, Stein sent ‘Mrs Emerson’, a short piece that is formally entertaining and elusive. It begins: The regular way of instituting clerical resemblances and neglecting hazards and bespeaking combinations and heroically and heroically celebrating instances [. . .] (1998: 23) and continues: The way to show shapes is to realise rightly that Mentionings are abominable. I can’t help it I can’t help hearing carrots. I do help it, I do help it fastening chocolate. A secret time in spinning. (1998: 27) This experimental prose tells a partial story resembling an experimental film. It processes sensation, perception and thought in a synaesthetic rush. The irony of the line ‘I cannot see I cannot see I cannot see. I cannot see. I cannot see beside always’ (24),4 in a response to cinema, forces the reader to ‘see’ elsewhere. Susan McCabe’s exquisite reading of Stein’s incorporation of ‘cultural tropes of bodily dislocation’ in ‘Mrs Emerson’ reveals the significance of Close-Up’s editorial decision to juxtapose her portrait directly with a text by Man Ray on his experimental ciné-poème, Emak Bakia (1928): ‘Stein’s recuperations of viscerality did not assert bodily wholeness; rather, Stein’s alternate modernism depended upon the incarnated, “existing,” and dismembered body materialized by the avant-garde film’ (2001: 403). Ray’s film typically fragments the female body into legs, lips, torsos; and, similarly to Stein’s appeal to the senses to register the present moment of existence, Ray ruminates on sight. The film is bookended with gags on looking: in the opening sequence Ray looks into a moving-image camera, with an eye superimposed onto one of the lenses, and in the closing sequence Kiki de Montparnasse ‘looks’ into the camera with her eyes closed, and eyes drawn over her closed eyelids. Stein, Ray and Dulac each comment on the affective experience of experiencing bodies in space, and on the screen, in differing but interrelated ways. The art of writing on film embraced the spatial, social and time-based experience of cinema-going: the cine-clubs, cinephilia and popular and modernist magazines (for fans and critics, respectively). Stein’s intellectual and phenomenological response to cinema seems aligned with Dulac’s ‘vision’ in their shared attention to the sensory effects of the medium; other film critics, meanwhile, emphasised film’s industrial and technological methods to challenge common perceptions of the cinema as lowbrow entertainment. The cinematic apparatus is a shining example of technology as muse: a means of seeing and sensing anew, bringing a kaleidoscopic world closer. To the already well-established connections between magic, occultism, science and montage5 were added new ideas based in synaesthetic experiences (H. D., Stein, Eisenstein) and phenomenological–philosophical writing (Bergson, Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty). Film criticism moved beyond its ocularcentric focus to explore avant-garde cinema’s potential to capture and interrogate the

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trauma and hope of the interwar years. An overwhelming desire to comprehend human reaction (and error) through measurement in science-based research contributed to the many philosophical debates on modernist time. Merleau-Ponty mused that cinematic time was exclusively tied to perception (as opposed to ordered thought): [A] movie has meaning in the same way that a thing does: neither of them speaks to an isolated understanding; rather, both appeal to our power tacitly to decipher the world or men and to coexist with them. It is true that in our ordinary lives we lose sight of this aesthetic value of the tiniest perceived thing. It is also true that the perceived form is never perfect in real life, that it always has blurs, smudges, and superfluous matter, as it were. (1964: 58) Dulac’s philosophy of film art draws fruitfully on the imperfection of the image. Writing for Le Rouge et le noir in July 1928, she vented her frustration at modern cinema’s tendency to drift back towards narrative at the expense of all else. For her, as for many others, film art (no matter whether silent, sound or colour) was participatory, and therefore extended beyond the screen: The visual shock is ephemeral, it is an impression one gets that suggests a thousand thoughts. A shock analogous to the one which creates a musical harmony. [. . .] The story is the surface. The Seventh Art is the art of the screen, making the depth that stretches out below this surface perceptible, it is musical intangible. (Dulac 2018: ‘Visual and Anti-Visual Films’ [1928]) Her paradoxical description pinpoints the fleeting but palpable energy that is unlocked in the simultaneous unspooling and projection of celluloid frames. Here film montage is not simply a matter of rhythmic editing or musical notation; it interpellates the viewer anew with each fragment and sensation. In his 1960 Theory of Film, Siegfried Kracauer was similarly interested in the affective qualities of ‘more or less free-hovering images of material reality’ that ‘[n]otwithstanding their latent or ultimately even manifest bearing on the narrative’ escape from the events on screen: ‘their cinematic quality lies precisely in their allusiveness’ (1997: 71). From this perspective, cinema is not a mausoleum, nor the ‘flawless storage’ that vanquishes death (Doane 1996: 338), but the point of genesis where the encounter between human and apparatus sparks life. Although Dulac was concerned that advances in technology and production should further her ability to make films internationally and connect with other professionals that she admired, such as D. W. Griffith or Jacques de Baroncelli (Williams 2014: 87–8), her artistic aims, as the images in her films, are blurry. This is both literal (in the sense that images can be out of focus, over- or underexposed, or deliberately distorted) and, by extension, philosophical: a ‘deep, categorical blurring involving a transgression of boundaries’, as Rosalind Krauss describes the heightened disregard for order or tradition found in Surrealist works (1999: 13). Surrealist emphasis on black humour, chance, irrational juxtaposition and a non-hierarchised blurring of low- and highbrow art and culture is similarly favoured by Dulac, who is concerned neither with perfection, nor with mastering a technology to achieve greater mimetic clarity. In a similar vein, Greek filmmaker Ado Kyrou called for cinema to reveal unexplored and extraordinary facets beneath, and beyond, the surface of everyday life.

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‘Eroticism, imagination, exaltation, infernal tension’, he writes, ‘are the elements of a cinema that will have at last rejected the void to forever advance with giant strides toward “something else”’ (‘Romanticism and Cinema’ [1951], qtd in Hammond 2000: 4). I find Kyrou’s ‘something else’ evocative and mysterious, an important intervention in the dialogues between cinema, psychoanalysis and surrealism. Cinematography seemed to materialise individual and collective lack into ‘something else’ – it offered a form of proxy fulfilment (much explored in later psychoanalytic film theory, from Metz and Mulvey to Marcus6), but also a dialectical means (montage) to test philosophical concerns with no preconceived outcomes. ‘Our lives are not limited to external manifestations,’ Dulac repeats, ‘but above all, and even more, consist of internal impressions which transform us into different mirrors of an identical action’ (2018: ‘Within Its Visual Frame’ [1931]). Dulac refers here, of course, to the collected throng of possible responses elicited from a given audience. But on an individual level, the words also seem to encapsulate the encounter between a cinema screen and a viewer’s sensing body, which creates a mise-en-abîme of selves and identities. Standing in front of a Cubist painting, a body multiplies in the repeated figural representation of ‘movement’; for the viewer in front of moving forms on the screen, shapes perform in fourdimensional space, the fourth dimension being ‘the image-dimension, which is also mind, thought, dream, memory’ (Mariën 2015: 62). Thoughts and impressions collide at a pace dictated by the image/sound, the rhythm of edits, superimpositions and dissolves, and the manipulation and fragmentation of bodies and objects. In ‘Non-Scientific Treatise on the Fourth Dimension’ [1944], Belgian Surrealist Marcel Mariën articulates a process of sensing reality that chimes with Dulac’s cinematic aims. For her, depth is intangible; for Mariën, modern life is surface, the viewer never quite apprehending ‘volume’, which is ‘the realm of hypotheses and legends’ (2015: 62). The proliferation of images (a pear becomes a new object when peeled, the bark of a tree a new surface when detached from the tree) requires the viewer’s imagination as the foundation upon which to evaluate ‘the content and intimate nature of things’ (2015: 63). In contradistinction to the Metzian view of film, where a lack of tactility is what constitutes the difference between a real object and its representation (Metz 1974: 9), Mariën and Dulac locate tactility and a psychological depth (perhaps paradoxically) in proliferating ‘surface’ images imbued with mental matter. All unfolds in the present, whether past or future; the viewer apprehends presence but senses absence, a lack or gap that contributes depth. This is not, then, only a cinema of attractions revelling in ‘pure instance’ (Gunning 2004: 49), but, as Stein also suggests, an opportunity for sensation to create new avenues for intellectual as well as emotional pursuit. Unlike in an essay, the viewer cannot pause the flow of ideas (the possibilities of home video were yet out of reach) but succumbs to them, perhaps reordering later in their own interior post-production. Mariën’s ‘treatise’ is an exemplar of early twentieth-century obsessions with the intersection of art, technology and a form of affective neuro-non-science or playful psychoanalysis. Time and space in the first half of the twentieth century were like nothing before: cinema brought far-flung regions into view, it combined new research in ethnology and ethnography, reanimated the dead and tracked the cosmos. It circulated globally, thanks to both commercial and private exhibition, and, most importantly, staged the ‘intimate nature of things’. Mariën’s description of the dimensions (height, width, depth, image) of objects found dynamism ultimately in the succession and surpassing

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of their surfaces (images), thereby locating meaning in gaps and ellipses, and aligning with Dulac’s theories of composition. Significantly, one of the most powerful sections of Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, where he writes substantially about cinematographic approaches to experiential time, focuses on absence, or nothing-ness. I have already suggested that the allure of early twentieth-century essays on the cinema rests in their fascination with the unknown, the unnoticed, the gaps. Bergson considers the ancient Eleatic school’s philosophical questioning of ‘eternal’ time against duration, where the immutable becomes impossible in the reality of perpetual flux and change. Although cinematographic art is considered as an analogy, he unspools a philosophical line that articulates the schisms between reality/representation and shot/flicker (or image/cut): It is [. . .] something negative, or zero at most, that must be added to Ideas to obtain change. In that consists the Platonic ‘non-being,’ the Aristotelian ‘matter’ – a metaphysical zero which, joined to the Idea, like the arithmetical zero to unity, multiplies it in space and time. By it the motionless and simple Idea is refracted into a movement spread out indefinitely. In right, there ought to be nothing but immutable Ideas, immutably fitted to each other. In fact, matter comes to add to them its void, and thereby lets loose the universal becoming. It is an elusive nothing, that creeps between the Ideas and creates endless agitation, eternal disquiet, like a suspicion insinuated between two loving hearts. [. . .] As to sensible reality, it is a perpetual oscillation from one side to the other of this point of equilibrium. (Bergson 2008: 317) Bergson does not consider the role of the filmmaker at all. However, what this idea has in common with Dulac’s concept of cinematic art is its phenomenological focus, which oscillates between facticity (the object in front of you – real or represented) and the invisible or not-yet-understood or materialised. Gaston Bachelard viewed time and space very differently and is equally provocative in analyses of modernist imagemaking. Where Bergson philosophises ‘becoming’ in image succession, Bachelard hypothesises a non-rational perspective opening into time and space that anticipates the cinematic intensities described by Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985): ‘we must be fully attentive to the image at the very moment it appears, both as itself and as a vibration of the psyche’ (Bachelard, qtd in Kearney 2014: xix). The thrill and beauty of the rupturing instant, ‘the very ecstasy of the newness of the image’ (Bachelard 2014: 1), has the potential to interrupt flow, something prioritised in Dulac’s cinematography and editing choices for La Coquille, which, despite its oneiric associative montage flow, introduces shock and incongruity, vertically. Describing the feminist montage of Dulac’s 1923 film La Souriante Madame Beudet (The Smiling Madame Beudet), Tami Williams observes how Dulac employed ‘a specifically cinematic system of signification based on the isolation and the opposition or synthesis of expressive gestures, which she used as “social critique”, and which were later developed in Eisenstein’s “intellectual montage”’ (Williams uses the example of the juxtaposition of Madeleine’s hands gracefully playing Debussy at the piano, with Monsieur Beudet’s hands counting money) (2014: 129). La Coquille, filmed towards the end of the decade, develops a far greater subtlety and confusion in its montage, imploring the viewer to be ‘fully attentive to the image’ and its instantaneous affect.

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Figure 12.3  Intertitle, La Coquille et le clergyman, Germaine Dulac, 1927. The psychological mechanism that drives the images is desire, a desire that appears out of nowhere, unannounced and all-consuming. As in all Surrealist films, neither the outcome nor the psychological reasoning behind it is important; what is significant is the affect generated at the moment of creation and in the work’s interaction with an audience.7 The intertitle at the beginning of La Coquille (Figure 12.3) states plainly Dulac’s cinematographic intent: [not a dream, but the world of images itself, enticing the spirit where it would never have consented to go, the mechanism is within reach of everyone.] Dulac’s images condense desire not in the grabbing hands and lascivious leer of the clergyman, but in the alchemical transfer of objects: liquid into glass, solid whole into shards, human body into mythical sea creature, dance into labour, landscapes into cityscapes, monarchical hierarchies into chess, water vapour into steel. One thing becomes another, at times bearing resemblance or matching movement, at others completely defined by difference, and all the while set within the fourth dimension of images. Dulac asserted that to know or understand was less important than to feel and to challenge. Her oneiric and object-centred films harness technology in-camera, and in post-production, reproducing human mental life. Mirroring the gaze and interior thought processes of male desire, she deliberately shifts focus to that of the female human and her temporality.

Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness: Reality, Surreality and the Migration of Ideas Witness and participant in countless world and civil wars, cinema reordered ‘things’ and gave to them new dimensions: ‘like those between different worlds and thoughts:

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struggle between madness and reason, the known and the unknown, you and me’ (Mariën 2015: 64). This section illustrates how an example of early Japanese experimental film, which takes the tension between so-called madness and order as its guiding principle, creates a vision and aesthetic that resonates with Dulac’s. Cinema’s ability to ‘reorder’ reality, recording both its known and its unknown aspects, straddled boundaries of discipline and medium, appealing to artists and writers such as those in the Paris Surrealist group. The ideas set out in André Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme (1924) reverberated across the globe. It is a pioneering modernist text which provoked and sustained transnational collaboration, political and exilic tracts, and revolutionary art, including cinema. In the ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ Breton instructs his reader (or viewer) to adopt a state of readiness to enable automatic thought unfettered by logic to appear (1972). In the mid-1920s, thanks to a small number of writers and artists, Breton’s ideas started to circulate in Japan. The Japanese word for surrealism – chō-genjitsushugi – was coined by poet Muramatsu Masatoshi in his essay ‘Reality and Surreality’, published in the May 1925 issue of the Bungei Nihon (Literary Japan) (Stojkovic 2020: 2). The Japanese translation is separated into two parts; genjitsushugi refers to the principle of realism/reality, while, as Miryam Sas explains, ‘chō- signifies transcendence as well as transgression – something that moves beyond the everyday, breaks the mold of the category it modifies’ (1999: 8). Significantly, this formal modification of reality through the transcendence of logic, order and the ordinary results, nevertheless, in an expansion that does not depart from reality. The Japanese government perceived surrealism to be dangerous, transgressive and Marxist: [Surrealism] aims to liberate the human mind by overcoming various inconsistencies in human psychology. It claims that the psychological phenomena cannot exist without a relation to the realms of material, that the psychological inconsistencies are reflections of inconsistencies of capitalist society and tyranny.8 This proclamation illustrates the power of formal dislocation to make tangible political interventions (as Dulac’s commentary on the clergyman’s odious desire demonstrates). To return to Kyrou’s concept of ‘something else’, we might consider how experimental film reproduces the everyday tension that is both anchored in, and transcendent of, lived experience. It should also be noted that while the European avantgardes provided inspiration for new formal experimentation, the ideas were not often followed wholesale, but fed into a burgeoning film culture that tackled homegrown social issues. In Japan in 1926, a year after the publication of Muramatsu’s essay, an extraordinary silent experimental film about madness was made by Kinugasa Teinosuke. Based on a treatment written by Nobel Prize-winning novelist Yasunari Kawabata, A Page of Madness (Kuruta ippeiji) tells the story of a young woman incarcerated in an ‘asylum’ (most likely driven to illness after her child drowns), and her husband, a retired sailor who takes up the position of janitor at the asylum to watch over her. The film’s poetic form evinces a pleasure in incongruity, irrationality and fantasy that has much in common with Surrealist principles. Stylistically, A Page of Madness shares a vocabulary with several European films of the 1920s – Murnau’s Der letze Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924), for example, or that trigger for ‘collective hypnosis’ (Kittler 1999: 146), Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari

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(The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, 1920) – and its illusory sequences, dominated by graphic lines and oblique angles, resemble the only surviving Futurist film, Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s Thaïs (1917). However, A Page of Madness might be the most audacious visual portrayal of the fourth dimension of its time. Its depiction of what Mariën called the ‘struggle between madness and reason’ is chaotic: the edits are frenetic, figures and objects are constantly in motion, and moments of genuine reflective sadness emanate from the film’s relational (dis)order. Kinugasa’s film hinges on the performances of the incarcerated woman, and a dancer whose presence symbolises the male inpatients’ fantasies, as well as embodying liberation. The viewer is unable to discern the seam between anguish and erotic spectacle, and that is the point. Spatio-temporal logic disappears in the overwhelming perspectival shifts. Standard shot-reverse shot logic, which would denote relational movement or an individual character’s interiority, is blurred, allowing emotion to bleed across and between the web of voyeuristic and alienated gazes. A Page of Madness invites the viewer to enter a Surrealist landscape which nonetheless never departs from reality, delivering a nightmarish vision of the human cost of state institutions. Whip pans, canted angles, spinning and blurred images, and eradication of contextual markers experiment with space at the service of the human mind in crisis. The viewer slips in and out of seemingly solid iron cell bars, both voyeur and participant in the opaque interior lives of the film’s uprooted protagonists. The film begins in media res during a heavy storm. The overexposed images of rain and overflowing water flicker in rapid succession: horizontally, vertically. Suddenly the viewer is plunged into a new plane of reality as a costumed dancer embraces the air, framed against a Futurist set. Then, a series of cell number plates appear and dissolve before we meet the first inpatients, the camera uniting their individual worlds cut by cut, rendering the environment kaleidoscopic. Like Breton’s state of readiness, so famously enacted in Luis Buñuel’s and Salvador Dalí’s series of match cuts which culminate in the slicing of an eye in Un Chien andalou (1928), Kinugasa’s tabula rasa creates an active viewer, awakened to a strange technological uncanny. The effect recalls the associative montage of early European Surrealist films, such as La Coquille, where, as Artaud explains, ‘The kind of virtual power images have goes rummaging in the depths of the mind for hitherto unused possibilities’ (2000: 104). For James Peterson, the poetic rebellion of A Page of Madness requires that viewers are not only challenged to separate the ‘real’ world of the primary story level from the level of character subjectivity, they must also distinguish between two types of subjective images: images of past events (memories) and images of imaginary events (fantasies, hallucinations, and dreams). (1989: 41) In its exploration of criminality, desire and desperation, A Page of Madness is an example of Japanese modernist avant-garde cinematography that is clearly underpinned by specific geopolitical concerns: imperialism, its status in the East Asian region, and discrimination against working-class, minority, migrant and mentally ill citizens. Kinugasa understands the power of cinematography to mobilise a rebellious anti-establishment sentiment. The film’s associative montage combines Japanese traditional arts – calligraphy, shunga (woodblock prints depicting sensual, erotic scenes), dance – with cropped and fragmented images of a reality torn from the mind.

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Desire and Fear – Between Avant-Garde and the Mainstream The process of identifying with one’s ‘like’ on screen (Mulvey 1975: 17–18), of desiring or fetishising an object, or of simply being prompted into a succession of thoughts triggered by a film and its transient objects, might seem to repeat or parallel the mechanics of a psychoanalytic session or a dream. The cinematic unconscious is all image, as Stephen Heath reminds us, ‘its provision of a residue of signifying traces [. . .] something only analytically calculable’ from individual viewer experience (Heath 1999: 27). In contrast, the human unconscious is embedded within layers of linguistic, pre-cognitive and emotional strata that are not presented externally in the same way; nor, as Bergson argued, are they subject to time. Film’s ‘blending of movement and stillness’ mirrors the ‘transformation of the animate into the inanimate’, a ‘point of uncertainty’ that plays on the difficulty of living with the reality of death (Mulvey 2006: 30). Lack, latency and lacunae generated by desire each may be set into play in the act of watching a film; a film narrative might fully cohere to Freud’s Oedipal scenario or reveal a protagonist’s neurosis or obsession (a thread that delighted Surrealists such as Breton, who was both attracted and repulsed by psychoanalytic theories – Freud and Jean-Marie Charcot, respectively); the orchestration of the gaze may align with objects of desire. Ultimately, Mary Ann Doane argues, scientists (she discusses chronophotographer Étienne-Jules Marey) and Freud ‘resisted the cinema because it adhered to the senses and was not amenable to the abstraction required either to illustrate the basic concepts of psychoanalysis or to produce scientific knowledge’ (Doane 1996: 343). Doane’s reference to psychoanalytic abstraction (or a mental reduction represented in the image) differs from the cinematic term abstraction as it used by Dulac, who deploys it in reference to the very representation of the senses that Freud seemingly dismisses. In Thèmes et variations (1928; Figures 12.4 and 12.5), Dulac mobilises her theoretical ideas, juxtaposing the graceful repetitions of a female dancer with matched

Figure 12.4  Thèmes et variations, Germaine Dulac, 1928.

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Figure 12.5  Thèmes et variations, Germaine Dulac, 1928. movement in the mechanical turns of pistons, wheels and bells. The viewer follows these themes and variations, musically imagined, and materialised in the ethereal dancer and the faster, glinting rotations of the machinery. Something is lost; it escapes, perhaps unnoticed, or too quickly replaced by the successive images? The human eye cannot see all. What occurs between the woman and the machines, or between the body and the impressionistically fashioned landscape and plant-life at the end of the short film? The possibilities teem. The hard and the delicate (masculine/ feminine) might suggest Kyrou’s eroticism; on the other hand, the lack of synthesis in this strange and vivid pas-de-deux is suggestively critical. The viewer must enter the ellipses, a blink or moment of distraction giving way to a flicker effect: ‘Lines, surfaces, volumes directly changing, without anything artificial, in the logic of their forms, stripped of all overly human meaning to better rise towards abstraction and give more room to feelings and dreams: INTEGRAL CINEMA’ (Dulac ‘From Sentiment to Line’ [February 1927], qtd in Williams 2014: 158). Dulac’s words are, like H. D.’s, Stein’s and Kyrou’s, filled with freedom. Synthesis transpires in the completion of the image by the viewer, where the inner life (she refers to souls, emotions, dreams) rises to meet the forms and figures dancing on screen. These sentiments were echoed in the film practice of certain filmmakers of the period who crossed over into commercial studio filmmaking; F. W. Murnau’s work for Ufa Studios laboratory (Universum Film-Aktien Gesellschaft, 1917–45) and 20th Century Fox stands out. His ultimate desire was to create a fully ‘architectural’ film that captured ‘the interplay of lines rising, falling, disappearing; the encounter of surfaces, stimulation and its opposite, calm; construction and collapse; the formation and destruction of a hitherto almost

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unsuspected life’ (Eisner 1973: 84). The contrast between the implied order and stability of architectural form and its impermanent cinematic equivalent relies upon minor and minute aspects to convey the bipartite reality of conscious and unconscious life. The conscious portion leans towards the philosophical (unsuspected life) rather than the analytical, with the cyclical movement of formation and destruction deliberately courting a lack of resolution or fixity. As Kracauer, commenting in 1947 on Murnau’s Schloss Vogelöd (The Haunted Castle, 1921) well understood, this was achieved in ‘[the] unique faculty of obliterating boundaries between the real and the unreal. Reality in his films was surrounded by a halo of dreams and presentiments’ (Kracauer 2004: 78). Angela Dalle Vacche’s reading of Count Orlok (aka Nosferatu, played by Max Schreck, in Murnau’s silent film Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, 1922) articulates how the character has two sides, one eliciting desire, the other inspiring fear. This lonely figure ‘can be seen as an embodiment of Romantic painting, of the supernatural in daily life, of an unfulfilled yearning toward the divine’ (1996: 162). In a thrilling sequence as the Count recoils at the threatening sunrise at an open window, his body is rendered partially transparent in a dissolve, becoming half flesh, half phantom, a negative reversal of divinity. In Murnau’s films humans are not ontologically favoured above nature or objects ‘but are revealed together’; fantasy and reality cannot be separated when ‘the world is already drawn by fantasy’ (Cavell 1971: 102). In Nosferatu the emotional and ‘spiritual’ emerge in a technical incorporeality that relies on translucence, magnification, superimposition and oblique editing to blur the distinction between phantom and human, or natural and artificial. In his commentary on the film (2013), Murnau’s friend and partner, the painter Walter Spies, notes how the director harnesses technical detail (focal length, telescopic lenses and stop motion) to portray the ‘other side’ of reality. Seeming to anticipate Làzsló Moholy-Nagy’s late 1920s teaching of X-ray photography, microphotography and astrophotography at the Bauhaus, Nosferatu’s Professor Bulwer studies the habits of carnivorous plants under a microscope. The resulting tinted microphotographs yield fantastic images (‘almost incorporeal’, Bulwer comments), which are intercut with shots of the imprisoned ‘madman’, Knock. This associative montage foregrounds scientific and technological ‘facts’ to establish an altered reality, not as self-reflexive trickery to showcase the apparatus or display cleverness, but to ‘photograph thought’,9 thereby capturing subtleties of prismatic interiority. This chapter has explored only a few of the marvellous examples of film and film criticism that constitute a history of modernist cinema. I have deliberately focused on avant-garde films that sought to capture something of the ephemeral sensations of modern life. In his manifesto ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’ (The Painter of Modern Life), Charles Baudelaire describes how ‘Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable’ (1972: 397). With the impossibility of ‘newness’ comes a different understanding of tradition, and for much of European modernism and its avant-gardes this meant a re-engagement with Romanticism, and with the place of human beings in the exterior world. Baudelaire favours the ‘transient’ flows above the sublime and ‘eternal’ view of nature, where humans are not overcome by the world, but share a mutual space and time with it (as Dulac’s and Murnau’s films hypothesise). The Romantic perspective engaged with:

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a philosophy of nature that presupposed dynamism, dialectic, animated nature [. . .] In such a cosmos, magical exchanges occur between humans and minerals, spirits and matter, poles and forces. In such a vision all is alive, historical, subject to change and movement. (Leslie 2005: 13) Much of this is evidenced in the films and essays that I have cited, where cinematography holds a paradoxically Romantic and occult charm, despite its clearly cutting-edge technology and ability to reimagine modern human existence. In these works, emotional depth reveals latent affect in technological surface: Dulac’s soft and rhythmic abstraction, Kinugasa’s experimental form, H. D. and Stein’s affective engagement with cinematography, all offer resubjectivised views of their respective realities. Surrealism is a central component of this renewed view of the world. Murnau’s philosophical experiments in studio-funded film projects exemplify the need to see oneself not only in nature, but in technology and artifice. It is Dulac, however, who offers the most urgent revision to our understanding of modernist cinema: her resolutely nonanthropocentric film-philosophy emphasises the world of objects through a deliberately female gaze. She insists that the future of cinema be technically marvellous: ‘An art of feelings’ (2018: [1923] ‘Mon ciné’).

Notes   1. Thanks to Phil Wickham at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum for providing me with an original copy of Gertrude Stein’s ‘Mrs Emerson’ from Close-Up magazine. Accessing artefacts from the period, like watching the films in their original format, brings the reader closer to their wonder.  2. See Canales, A Tenth of a Second, which connects creative and technological modernist mediums to the nineteenth-century European preoccupation with an oft-universally accepted unit of measuring affect and cognition in humans. This unit was problematically deployed to determine the slowness or speed of a given human’s sense of perception, leading to key debates in physical, psychical and metaphysical existence, as well as being central to Walter Benjamin’s theories of film (2009: 223–4).   3. Volapük was a universal language created in 1879/80 by Johann Martin Schleyer. It was eclipsed by Esperanto (invented by Ludwig Zamenhoof in 1887) by the turn of the century.   4. Stein’s original article contains deliberate rhythmic spacing, which is not reproducible here given the specificity of print layout.   5. In Russia, Sergei Eisenstein popularised a theory of montage which he saw as being at the service of the audience: ‘Revolutionary form is the product of correctly ascertained technical methods for the concretisation of a new attitude and approach to objects and phenomena – of a new class ideology’ (1998: 55).   6. See, for example, Metz (1982), Mulvey (1975, 1996 and 2006) and Marcus (2014).  7. Both Williams (2014) and de Julio (2013) cite Alain Virmaux’s essay, ‘La Coquille et le clergyman: essai d’élucidation d’une querelle mythique’ (2009), which discusses the correspondence between Dulac and screenwriter Antonin Artaud in detail.  8. The anti-establishment Surrealist spirit of the 1920s culminated in an annual government report entitled ‘The Condition of Social Movements During the 16th Year of Shōwa’ (1931), which posited surrealism as Communism’s cultural face, discussed in Tezuka (2005: 122–3).  9. Taken from an interview with Murnau in Theatre Magazine, January 1928. In Petrie (2002): 94.

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Works Cited Artaud, Antonin (2000 [ca. 1928]), ‘Sorcery and Cinema’, in The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema, trans. and ed. Paul Hammond. San Francisco: City Lights Books, pp. 103–5. Bachelard, Gaston (2014 [1958]), The Poetics of Space [La Poétique de l’espace], trans. Maria Jolas. New York: Penguin Books. Baudelaire, Charles (1972 [1863]), Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, ed. P. E. Charvet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bergson, Henri (2008 [1911]), Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt and Company, (last accessed 24 January 2022). Breton, André (1972 [1924]), ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, in Manifestos of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 3–47. Canales, Jimena (2009), A Tenth of a Second: A History. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. Canudo, Ricciotto (1993 [1923]), ‘Reflections on the Seventh Art’, in French Film Theory and Criticism: A History /Anthology 1907–1929, Volume 1, ed. Richard Abel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 291–303. Cavell, Stanley (1971), The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dalle Vacche, Angela (1996), Cinema and Painting: How Art is Used in Film. London: The Athlone Press. De Julio, Maryann (2013), ‘Another Look at Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell and the Clergyman’, Senses of Cinema, 69 (December), (last accessed 24 January 2022). Doane, Mary Anne (1996), ‘Temporality, Storage, Legibility: Freud, Marey, and the Cinema’, Critical Inquiry, 22 (Winter), pp. 313–43. Dulac, Germaine (2018), Germaine Dulac: Writings on Cinema (1919–1937), trans. Scott Hammen, ed. Prosper Hillairet. Paris: Paris Expérimental and Eyewash Books, Kindle Edition. Eisenstein, Sergei (1998 [1925]), ‘The Problem of the Materialist Approach to Form’, in The Eisenstein Reader, trans. Richard Taylor and William Powell, ed. Richard Taylor. London: BFI Publishing, pp. 53-9. Eisner, Lotte (1973), Murnau. London: Secker and Warburg. Everett, Anna (2001), Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism 1909–1949. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Gee, Felicity (2021), Magic Realism, World Cinema, and the Avant Garde. London and New York: Routledge. Guerin, Frances (2005), A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Gunning, Tom (2004), ‘“Now You See It, Now You Don’t”: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions’, in The Silent Cinema Reader, ed. Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 41–50. Hammond, Paul (2000), ‘Available Light’, in The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema, ed. Paul Hammond. San Francisco: City Lights Books, pp. 1–45. H. D. (1998 [November 1927]), ‘The Mask and the Movietone’, in Close-Up 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism, ed. James Donald, Anna Friedberg and Laura Marcus. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 114–20.

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Heath, Stephen (1999), ‘Cinema and Psychoanalysis: Parallel Histories’, in Endless Night Cinema and Psychoanalysis: Parallel Histories, ed. Janet Bergstrom. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 25–57. Kearney, Richard (2014), ‘Introduction’, in Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space [La Poétique de l’espace], trans. Maria Jolas. New York: Penguin Books, pp. xvii–xxvii. Kittler, Friedrich A. (1999 [1986]), Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kracauer, Siegfried (1997 [1960]), Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. New York: Oxford University Press. Kracauer, Siegfried (2004 [1947]), From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Krauss, Rosalind E. (1999), Bachelors. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kyrou, Ado (2000 [1963]), ‘The Marvellous is Popular’, in The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema, trans. and ed. Paul Hammond. San Francisco: City Lights Books, pp. 68–71. Leslie, Esther (2005), Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry. London: Reaktion Books. McCabe, Susan (2001), ‘“Delight in Dislocation”: The Cinematic Modernism of Stein, Chaplin, and Man Ray’, Modernism/modernity, 8: 3 (September), pp. 429–52. Marcus, Laura (2014), Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mariën, Marcel (2015 [1944]), ‘Non-Scientific Treatise on the Fourth Dimension’, in The Surrealism Reader: An Anthology of Ideas, ed. Dawn Ades and Michael Richardson, with Krzysztof Fijalkowski. London: Tate Publishing, pp. 59–64. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1964 [1948]), Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Metz, Christian (1974 [1971]), Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Metz, Christian (1982), The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annywyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti. London: Macmillan Press. Mulvey, Laura (1975). ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16.3 (Autumn), pp .6–18. Mulvey, Laura (1996), Fetishism and Curiosity: Cinema and the Mind’s Eye. London and Bloomington: BFI Publishing and Indiana University Press. Mulvey, Laura (2006), Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books. Nada, Hiroshi (1992), ‘An Aspect of the Reception of Avant-Garde Films in Japan’, Iconics, 2, pp. 47–74. Péret, Benjamin ([1951] 2000), ‘Against Commercial Cinema’, translated in The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema, ed. Paul Hammond. San Francisco: City Lights, pp. 59-60. Potamkin, Harry A. (1998 [August 1929]), ‘The Aframerican Cinema’, in Close-Up 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism, ed. James Donald, Anna Friedberg and Laura Marcus. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 65–72. Peterson, James (1989), ‘A War of Utter Rebellion: Kinugasa’s “Page of Madness” and the Japanese Avant-Garde of the 1920s’, Cinema Journal, 29: 1 (Autumn), pp. 36–53. Petrie, Graham (2002), Hollywood Destinies: European Directors in America, 1922–1931. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Sas, Miryam (1999), Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Stein, Gertrude (1998 [1927]), ‘Mrs Emerson’, Close-Up, 1: 1–6, pp. 23–9. Stein, Gertrude (1988 [1935]), Lectures in America. London: Virago Press.

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Stojkovic, Jelena (2020), Surrealism and Photography in 1930s Japan: The Impossible AvantGarde. London: Routledge. Tezuka, Miwako (2005), Jikken Kōbō [Experimental Workshop]: Avant-Garde Experiments in Japanese Art of the 1950s, PhD thesis, Columbia University. Virmaux, Alain (2009), Artaud-Dulac: La Coquille et le clergyman: essai d’élucidation d’une querelle mythique. Paris: Editions Paris Expérimental. Williams, Tami (2014), Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Filmography A Page of Madness (2015 [1926]), directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa, Blu-ray. Japan: Flicker Alley. Le Ballet mécanique (2018 [1924]), directed by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy. San Francisco: Kanopy Streaming, Filmmakers Showcase.  La Coquille et le clergyman (2008 [1927]), directed by Germaine Dulac, DVD. France: Light Cone / Paris Expérimental. Étude cinégraphique sur une Arabesque aka Arabesques (2002–8 [1929]), directed by Germaine Dulac, on Cinexpérimentaux 8: Cooperative Lightcone by Frédérique Dévaux and Michel Amarge, DVD. France: Light Cone / Paris Expérimental. Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror [1922] (2013), directed by F. W. Murnau, Blu-ray. Germany: Eureka Entertainment. La Souriante Mme. Beudet (2019 [1922]), directed by Germaine Dulac, on Early Women Filmmakers Collection, Blu-ray. UK: BFI. Thèmes et variations (2008 [1928]), directed by Germaine Dulac. France: Light Cone / Paris Expérimental.

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13 Radio: Blindness, Disability and Technology Emily C. Bloom

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he first generation of radio scholars labelled radio ‘the blind medium’ and returned obsessively to cataloguing the benefits and drawbacks of blindness. Not only was blindness a ubiquitous metaphor for defining the non-visual qualities of the radio medium, but early radio dramatists often used blind characters to orient listeners to the auditory space of the radio play. Looking back at this literature, a pattern emerges in which scholars evoke the experience of the blind, only to discount the blind listener as the imagined audience of radio broadcasting. This chapter will consider the central role of disability in defining early radio for producers, writers and critics, and also its significance for blind listeners. Radio broadcasters could evoke blindness, but they were only rarely – and opportunistically – willing to define the medium by its accessibility to blind listeners. The proliferation of audio technologies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought about a renewed interest in sound, an interest that sparked anxieties about the hierarchy of the senses. This hierarchy positions sight as ‘higher’ than hearing and has been, according to Martin Jay, a pervasive thread in Western thought, reaching back to Plato and leading to an understanding of sight as the ‘master sense of the modern era’ (1993: 543). Jonathan Sterne describes the dominance of what he calls an ‘audio-visual litany’ in American and European philosophy and cultural criticism, which characterises hearing as ‘manifesting a kind of pure interiority’, while either praising or blaming vision as a sense that allows distance and, with it, reason (2003: 15). The literature around one twentieth-century sound technology – radio – reveals that an underlying concern in these debates about hearing versus seeing is a preoccupation with disability, and particularly blindness. In Enforcing Normalcy, Lennard J. Davis describes how the rise of print focused attention on deafness among a public acclimatising to silent reading. If, as Davis writes, ‘Europe became deaf during the eighteenth century’ (1995: 51), then blindness came to define the sonic landscape of the early twentieth century as radio producers, writers and listeners learned to communicate with what was, for many, an unnervingly auditory medium. Over the last ten years, modernist studies has seen a new wave of work in radio studies, often under the label of ‘radio modernism’, first coined by Todd Avery (2006).1 Much of this scholarship borrows theoretical frameworks from sound studies to examine the epistemologies of auditory technologies and their relationship to literary works. Following recent trends in new modernist studies, this work sheds light on the role of popular forms and genres in the production of modernist literature. This scholarship,

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in many ways an expansion of periodical studies, embraces the role of the broadcast medium as a site for the dissemination of modernist texts in the form of talks, poetry and prose readings and radio drama. Formalist approaches in this vein show how the aesthetics of radio motivates, influences or is sympathetic with modernist aesthetics, while also paying close attention to the political stakes of the medium, which allowed for the dissemination of competing ideologies on an unprecedented scale. While much work has focused on domestic broadcasting by Anglo-American institutions, there has been a gradual expansion of the field to encompass global modernism.2 At the same time, modernist studies has seen a proliferation of work in disability studies that recognises the central importance of neurodiversity and bodily vulnerability among modernist themes, as well as the ways in which modernism was shaped in the shadow of eugenics.3 Maren Tova Linett argues that in breaking apart traditional narrative, modernists ‘inquired into the metaphoric meanings disabilities had come to bear, often challenging normative understandings of embodiment’ (2016: 2). Radio studies and disability studies may seem quite distinct, with one highlighting a supposedly disembodied medium and the other focusing on the imbricated bodymind. This perceived difference belies the fact that many communication technologies, including radio, were promoted as accessibility aids for a range of disabilities or as technologies intended to eradicate disability.4 Within disability studies, calls for ‘disability media studies’ and ‘crip technoscience’ are exploring new connections between media, science, technology and disability. The collection Disability Media Studies, edited by Elizabeth Ellcessor, Mack Hagood and Bill Kirkpatrick, argues for linking the fields of disability studies and media studies in order ‘to better address media’s materiality and a wide range of practices of reception’ (Ellcessor et al. 2017: 18). Rather than treating technological media like radio in terms of disembodiment, these critics highlight the materiality of media and its impact on embodied subjects. In providing an overview of this emerging field, the editors chart a shift from early work that focuses on representations of people with disabilities in media (especially film and television), to more recent work that studies ‘the lived experiences of people with disabilities – who often use media quite differently’ (18). Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch, the co-editors of ‘Crip Technoscience’, a special issue of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience (2019) begin with a similar premise: that disability studies approaches to science, technology and media must focus on the experience of disabled users. Drawing upon recent work in critical disability studies with its focus on justice and intersectionality, Hamraie and Fritsch emphasise the role of disabled people as users and developers of their own technological systems and, while repudiating the notion that technology could or should provide a ‘cure’ for disability, they argue that ‘technoscience can be a transformative tool for disability justice’ (3). Bringing these insights into modernist radio studies involves paying closer attention to the materiality of a supposedly ‘disembodied’ medium and challenging normative constructions of the listening public.

Debating Blindness The use of disability metaphors is pervasive in radio studies, a phenomenon that Mara Mills identifies across a range of scholarship in media, science and technology, which, she argues, exploits disability ‘as a metaphor and exemplar’ (2015: 177). Moreover, as

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David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have observed, ‘Disability underwrites the cultural study of technology writ large’ (2000: 8). New inventions in the modernist period drew alarmist concerns about disablement or, on the other hand, futurist claims about curing or eradicating disability; but in both cases, disability served as a spectre against which all innovation must contend. The first generation of radio broadcasters and critics in the 1920s and 1930s relied extensively on disability metaphors to explain the difficulty of radio-listening for a public unused to acousmatic sound. Blindness became a common metaphor for explaining the audience’s relationship to a space inhabited by speakers, characters and scenes that they could not see. Significantly, the blind listener evoked by radio critics was rarely understood to be actually blind.5 In one of the earliest theoretical books on radio, Rudolf Arnheim writes, ‘wireless rules out a certain range of sense in a most startling way. It seems much more sensorily [sic] defective and incomplete than the other arts – because it excludes the most important sense, that of sight’ (1936: 135). Arnheim draws upon the hierarchy of the senses to describe radio’s reliance on audition as a sign of its defectiveness. Yet he goes on to champion these very features of radio broadcasting in a chapter titled ‘In Praise of Blindness’, in which he claims that the formal possibilities and constraints of radio – what later critics might call its protocols or affordances – give radio drama a sense of unity through its exclusive focus on the auditory. Following a similar line of reasoning, the BBC producer Donald McWhinnie asks his readers in The Art of Radio (1959) to consider the ways in which radio’s blindness enables the development of auditory expertise. McWhinnie was a significant presence in radio modernism, producing Samuel Beckett’s works for the BBC’s Third Programme and promoting experimental drama on air. In his treatise on radio drama, he begins by describing audition as a more difficult sensory experience than vision, one that individuals must learn to master at a later developmental stage; children, he argues, prefer visuals until they learn to appreciate language. He then evokes blind men and women as exemplars of advanced audition. He describes the experience of his archetypal blind man as follows: There are no hypnotic flickers of light to shield him from the knives of reality; he must apprehend reality, interpret it and react to it in a split second, and by a hypersensitive ability to create the whole out of a part [. . .] His vision of the world he cannot see might well be alarming to the sighted because it is necessarily so penetrating, so little influenced by embellishment or distraction. (23) McWhinnie’s imagined blind man is not only the ideal radio listener, but the modernist audience par excellence – someone with a preternatural ability to shape sonic cacophony into a vision of the world shed of its illusions. McWhinnie relies on what disability theorists describe as supercrip stereotypes to attribute hypersensory abilities to the blind.6 Like Arnheim, McWhinnie praises blindness, but he also follows Arnheim in evoking blindness only to dispense with it. He goes on to write: although the experience of the radio listener is similar to that of the blind man, there is this important difference: the sound-complex the listener hears has been carefully calculated in advance and designed to achieve a certain emotional and physical effect: it is not just a random collection of noises but a prefabricated pattern. (24)

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According to this logic, the blindness experienced by a blind person is a ‘random collection of noises’, whereas the blindness experienced by the sighted radio listener has aesthetic value. McWhinnie does not stop to consider the aesthetic experiences of blind radio listeners or producers in his distinction between the blind person and the radio listener. In contrast to the use of these disability metaphors in early radio studies, scholars of blindness have shown the complexity and value of aesthetic experiences by the blind, which make use of the senses of sound, touch and sight (though not always sight as understood by the non-blind). Foremost among this scholarship is Georgina Kleege’s Sight Unseen, which is, incidentally, also the title of a critical study of radio drama by Elissa S. Guralnick.7 Writing as a blind scholar, Kleege describes various aesthetic experiences: looking at a painting by Matisse at a museum, watching films, reading books in various formats (braille, codex and audio) and also listening to radio. Her description of a radio broadcast focuses on an interview between Liane Hansen and the photographer Howard Schatz on the subject of his book Homeless: Portraits of Americans in Hard Times. Kleege describes Schatz and Hansen as ‘engaged in the difficult task of describing a visual phenomenon to an audience that cannot see it, an audience temporarily blind’ (1999: 130–1). Kleege does not challenge the trope of radio’s blindness, but modifies it with an emphasis on its temporal limitations. The radio programme about photography radically puts the blind and sighted listener on an equal footing, if only for a moment. Kleege’s disappointment in the programme is that the participants ‘fall back on certain figures of sighted speech which point to the eyes as not only the focal point of every face but as the site of all significant experience’ (131). Even if all radio listeners are temporarily blind in their reliance on audio description in order to ‘see’ the photographs, there is no doubt raised in the conversation between Schatz and Hansen that the listener is missing out on something by not having access to the images. The sighted listener can rectify this by buying a copy of the book once the programme ends. The blind listener cannot. One common theme among scholars of blindness is the ways in which the nonblind take for granted the self-evidence of vision. As Kleege writes, ‘The sighted can be touchingly naïve about vision. They apparently believe that the brain stays out of it’ (96). By paying attention to blindness, Kleege argues, we can better understand the slippery relationship between the bodymind and the world. Building upon this theme, Rod Michalko writes in an essay, ‘What’s Cool about Blindness?’, that ‘We know of the existence of sight because of its opposite, the existence of blindness. It might even be said that sight owes its existence to blindness’ (2010). Returning to early debates on radio’s blindness through contemporary disability studies, blindness emerges as a more complex and more enabling discourse for media studies than either its early proponents or detractors allowed. Moving beyond disability metaphors, a critical approach to blindness in modernist radio should allow for interpretations of aesthetic experiences that do not take for granted the self-evidence of sight. As the blind detective Lee Masters says in the South African radio series ‘The Sounds of Darkness’, ‘when a man can see, he gets lazy’ (O’Shaughnessy 1967).8 Blind characters in radio drama, like Masters, often served as native informants to sighted listeners who needed to be re-educated in the use of their senses. In the following sections, I will shift focus from radio criticism to modernist radio drama in order to examine how the metaphor of radio’s blindness was translated into the trope of the blind character.

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Blind Characters Including blind characters in the diegetic world of the radio play became a common device to link the viewer’s experience of temporary blindness with the action taking place in the drama. It allowed the dramatist to include additional explication when another character appeared to apprise the blind character of events that were happening that they, and by extension the audience, could not see. In his radio adaptation of Sergei Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevsky, for instance, Louis MacNeice invents a new character, Blind Iuri, as what Ian Whittington calls ‘a diegetical surrogate for the listener’ (2018: 100). The audience is placed in a position of unique intimacy with blind characters who become their guides. In a compilation of American radio programmes, the Old Time Radio Catalog lists 108 programmes that are on the topic of blindness or that feature blind characters (‘Blind Tales in Old Time Radio’). Popular programmes capitalised on blind characters to create suspense, evoke pity or sympathy, tell tales of triumph over adversity, or exploit blindness for humour. In the suspense or horror genre, the listener could find themselves in the position of the blind character who is the potential victim, perpetrator or detective of a crime and must listen for auditory clues about what would happen next. The over-representation of blind characters in radio drama helps explain the popularity of H. G. Wells’s ‘The Country of the Blind’ on the airwaves. This story flipped the usual radio script by introducing not one blind character, but rather an entire village of blind characters. Here, the listener surrogate is not the blind character, but instead the lone sighted person who must learn to navigate in a world created by and for the blind. It was the first Wells story broadcast on the BBC in an adaptation that the author himself approved, which was written by E. G. King-Bull and produced by Lance Sieveking (9 January 1933). Later broadcasts in the US included the series Escape (CBS, 1947), Ronald Colman’s Favorite Story (1949, as ‘Strange Valley’), Laurence Olivier’s Theater Royal (NBC, 1954) and Suspense (CBS, 1957). ‘The Country of the Blind’ tells the story of a mountaineer, Francisco Nunez, who stumbles upon a valley in the Andes inhabited by a community of blind men and women who have been cut off from the rest of society for fifteen generations. The first generation was blinded by a mysterious illness and later generations inherited this trait until every man, woman and child was blind. Nunez discovers that in the valley of the blind, his sight does not make him king, as the proverb claims, but rather becomes an impairment. Disability studies scholars have singled out the story for its illustration of the social model of disability, which argues that social, institutional and environmental factors produce disability (Kleege 1999: 78–80; Linett 2016: 63–6). In ‘The Country of the Blind’ the native people do not experience their blindness as an impairment because they have built their world to accommodate their other senses. Their bodies are not in conflict with their surroundings, but rather they exist seamlessly within their environment. In contrast, Nunez’s sighted body and mind clash with the world around him. His sense of hearing is less refined than that of the villagers, he cannot navigate in the dark, he speaks more loudly and coarsely than they do, and he cannot curb his use of metaphors that rely on the importance of sight, which become meaningless in this new environment. The villagers find him to be unintelligent, unattractive and dangerous. When he falls in love with Medina-Saroté, the daughter of his master, the village elders offer to ‘cure’ him by removing his eyes as a condition to allow him to marry one of

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their own. Wells struggled with the story’s ending, writing several different versions: in one early manuscript, Nunez flees, only to return to face the surgeons, whereas in the published version of 1904, he escapes to the mountains, where he faces near-certain death (Parrinder 1990). In an ironic twist in the Escape script written by John Dunkel (1947), Nunez manages to make it over the Andes mountains, but the perilous journey through the wind, glaring sun and bitter cold has rendered him blind at last. Each radio adaptation introduced important differences into the story, but in all of them the radio listener is positioned close to Nunez – much closer, in fact, than in Wells’s original story. The radio versions consistently replaced Well’s third-person omniscient narrator with Nunez as narrator, often through the use of a frame narrative in which Nunez returns to tell a former member of his expedition the tale of his disappearance. In the Escape version, the actor playing Nunez is physically closer to the microphone than the actors playing blind villagers in an example of what Neil Verma calls ‘intimate audioposition’. Verma argues that in radio scripts that use ‘intimate audioposition’, the first-person narrator ‘“carries” the listener not just because the story tells us so, but also because on a visceral level he or she is “closer” to us than anyone else, as indicated by volume in narration’ (2012: 62). Just as Nunez must strain to understand the inhabitants of the country of the blind, the listener has to lean closer to the radio set to make out their words.9 In the final scene of the frame narrative, Nunez finishes recounting his adventures to the mining engineer Ibara, who only then realises that the man telling the tale is blind. The twist here is that once Nunez reveals that he is now blind, the audience discovers that they have been listening to a blind man all along. After bringing the listener close to the protagonist, singling him out as the relatable sighted man against a muffled backdrop of blind villagers, the script turns this identification on its head by revealing Nunez, in the present moment, to be blind himself. Whereas the Escape episode of ‘The Country of the Blind’ draws upon radio’s intimacy to push the listener surreptitiously towards a closer identification with a blind character, Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood introduces listeners to a blind perspective that they are asked, ultimately, to transcend. One way of understanding these different approaches is through Verma’s distinction between two forms of audioposition – the intimate version that we see in this episode of Escape, which positions the listener closer to the consciousness of a particular character, and ‘kaleidosonic audioposition’, which presents a cast of many different voices on a relatively equal footing (Verma 2012: 58–73). We see an example of the latter in Under Milk Wood, which introduces the listener to a symphony of different voices, one of which is a blind retired sea captain, Captain Cat. Under Milk Wood, one of the few canonical plays written for the radio medium, is set in an imaginary Welsh seaside town called Llareggub. There is no main protagonist, but among the villagers, Captain Cat emerges as a central figure. The play was written in close collaboration with the BBC Features Department, which often eschewed traditional dramatic conventions of setting and plot while pioneering radiogenic formal experimentation.10 The Feature programme was characterised by a collage-like approach that introduced many voices and moved quickly through time and space. The producer of Under Milk Wood, Douglas Cleverdon, described the feature as follows: A radio feature is, roughly, any constructed programme (that is, other than news bulletins, racing commentaries, and so forth) that derives from the technical apparatus of radio (microphone, control-panel, recording gear, loud-speaker). It can

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combine any sound elements – words, music, sound effects – in any form or mixture of forms – documentary, actuality, dramatized, poetic, musico-dramatic. It has no rules determining what can or cannot be done. And though it may be in dramatic form, it has no need of a dramatic plot. (1969: 17) Cleverdon goes on to say that, in moving away from dramatic conventions and encouraging formal experimentation, the feature programme was ideally suited to poets. In early drafts of the script, Thomas toyed with the idea of making Captain Cat the narrator and central character (Cleverdon 1969: 5). The final version of the play does away with the character–narrator in favour of two voices – simply First Voice and Second Voice – who speak directly to the listener, introducing the villagers and weaving in and out of the narration. The rest of the play is comprised of the voices of sixty-two characters; and yet Captain Cat remains central to the story and his blindness plays an important role in framing the experience of the listener. The play begins with a ‘First Voice’ speaking ‘very softly’ to the audience. The voice sets the opening pre-dawn scene as follows: ‘The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock’ (Thomas 1954: 1). Thomas presents two versions of blindness: the blindness of the mole that thrives in the dark, and the blindness of Captain Cat, a former sailor. Towards the end of the play, the First Voice will describe Captain Cat thus: ‘Like a cat, he sees in the dark’ (92). Unlike the other residents of Llareggub, moles, cats and Captain Cats can see in the dark and are therefore excellent conduits for listeners asked to see in the dark. Captain Cat (always described by the First Voice as Blind Captain Cat) is the first character introduced to the listener and remains an important focal point for the stream of voices to follow. He is the one who pulls the rope of the townhall bell, waking the sleepers from their dreams and literally opening their eyes (26). He also ‘hears all the morning of the town’, interpreting sounds with great specificity: he deciphers a child’s cry as Billy Swansea hitting Maggie Richards and a knock on the door as the work of Willy Nilly, the postman. In so doing, he introduces the listener to a number of characters through their sonic shibboleths – crying, knocking, feet on cobblestones, slamming doors and organ music – and teaches them how to interpret these sounds. In the opening monologue, the First Voice speaks to the radio listener directly, telling them that they have been gifted with unique modes of sensory perception: Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night. Only you can see, in the blinded bedrooms, the combs and petticoats over the chairs, the jugs and basins, the glasses of teeth, Thou Shalt Not on the wall, and the yellow dicky-bird-watching pictures of the dead. (3) The listener here is gifted with supernatural abilities of sight and hearing, able to see past the ‘blinded bedrooms’ and into the very dreams of the townspeople. Captain Cat’s extra-sensory insight is therefore placed a step below the listener’s supernatural abilities to see and hear through the magic of radio. The listener’s senses ultimately transcend those of Captain Cat, whose abilities are circumscribed to the world of Llareggub and whose blindness, unlike the listener’s, is not temporary.

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Captain Cat teaches the listener to navigate an auditory environment, but the listener is then expected to move beyond blind audition towards an omniscience that is only possible through the radio performance. Blind characters like Captain Cat serve as guides for the temporarily blinded listener, who will be able to shrug off the posture of blindness once the play is over. The listener, presumably sighted, will better appreciate and sharpen their senses of hearing and sight by imagining a state of blindness. Whereas blind characters proliferated in radio broadcasting, Matthew Rubery notes that in the production of audiobooks for the blind, works with representations of blindness were often de facto censored in order not to offend blind listeners (2016: 178). Comparing these disparate approaches to two audio formats – one for a general population and one for the blind – we see blindness as a trope deployed to speak to a sighted radio audience, whereas blind listeners to audiobooks were, rightly or wrongly, often spared from these representations.

Radio for the Blind Even if radio producers and writers did not consider blind listeners as their audience, blind listeners were quick to consider radio. From the emerging scholarship on blind radio listeners, notably work by Rebecca Scales and Bill Kirkpatrick, a few themes emerge. First, when broadcasters did consider blind listeners, it was often in the context of charity work that, in turn, helped to legitimise the public role of radio. Radio for the blind and other disabled groups emerged as a notable social benefit of the medium, one that broadcasters could periodically foreground for strategic purposes. Second, blind listeners, like other radio listeners, were voracious correspondents who articulated their own programming preferences, not all of which point in the same direction. And finally, blind listeners not only were the passive recipients of broadcasts, but also played important, and often unheralded, roles in the development of the medium. Some of the earliest and most well-documented blind listeners were veterans of the First World War, many of whom had been blinded by poison gas. Rebecca Scales and Bill Kirkpatrick have described the role of radio in endeavours to rehabilitate the war blind in France and the US, respectively. The war blind were a strategically important group for early radio boosters who sought legitimacy for the medium. Scales describes how broadcasters in France promoted the wireless as a means of rehabilitating war veterans into national life and in so doing ‘vigorously promoted this concept of radio as a media that should serve the nation’s citizens’ (2016: 65). Schemes to put radios in hospitals and to provide free radios to veterans appealed to patriotism while touting the benefits of radio in connecting the war blind to the wider community and, especially, to national life. Organisations like Radio for the Blind (France), Wireless at the Hospital (France) and the British Wireless for the Blind Fund drew upon the patriotic appeal of serving the war blind and widened their scope from there to include the benefits to the broader blind community. A notice for the BBC’s annual Christmas Day appeal for the British Wireless for the Blind Fund in Radio Times tells readers, ‘There is no need to stress here what wireless means to the blind listener. It is his newspaper, his theatre, his cinema’ (‘Appeal’ 1931). The Fund began in 1928 as an endeavour to provide a free radio to every blind person in the UK and the Christmas Day appeals were delivered by Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and Lloyd George, among others.11 During the Christmas appeal of 1934 and

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Figure 13.1  ‘Blind listener, Mr Oransby (right), listening to his Crystal Radio Set with headphones, December 1929’. Reproduced with permission from the BBC Photo Library. again in 1939, listeners were addressed by an ‘Unknown Blind Man’ who, Radio Times reported in 1939, ‘made so many friends when he spoke about himself and his fellows five Christmases ago’ (‘Wireless for the Blind’). It is with a curious mixture of anonymity and intimacy that Radio Times refers to the speaker as an ‘Unknown Blind Man’ and yet emphasises his success in making friends with his listeners through the act of broadcasting. Intimacy is another site where radio and blindness share a discourse. Radio, by bringing the voice of the speaker into the private home, created affective bonds between broadcasters and their listeners in the form of ‘fireside chats’ and other intimate modes of address. On the other hand, Linett argues that modernist writers viewed ‘blindness as conducive to intimacy’ because ‘the absence of vision makes way for greater attention to hearing and touch, two senses understood to foster human attachment’ (2016: 84). The blind man addressing an audience of sighted listeners could appeal to this understanding of sound-mediated intimacy, even while the BBC refuses to call him by his name. For all the advantages that radio offered to blind broadcasters and listeners, enumerated by the ‘Unknown Blind Man’, it could also present other obstacles; Kirkpatrick points out that the radio set itself, with its ‘fiddly tuning knobs and often hard-to-read dials—could itself be a disabling technology for much of its history, even as it enabled new forms of cultural participation’ (2018: 474). Radio’s elevation of the auditory, moreover, was disabling for deaf people in the era before transcription services were widely available.12 Broadcasting institutions were also forceful gatekeepers of access, blocking individuals with a range of disabilities, especially those, like stuttering, that

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had an impact on the ‘good’ radio voice, and preventing access on the grounds of race, gender and nationality.13 Expanding on the metaphor of blindness, radio broadcasters claimed to be ‘colour-blind’, a claim that belied the actual discriminatory practices of broadcasting corporations.14 In letters to broadcasters and within publications for the blind, blind listeners articulated their programming preferences and described both the tremendous benefits they found in listening to radio drama, news reporting and music, and the areas that they wished to change. Scales describes debate in France among blind radio enthusiasts about whether programming should speak directly to the needs of the blind, or whether the benefit of radio was in providing the same services to the blind as to sighted listeners. Programmes specifically for the blind, such as the BBC’s In Touch, which was pioneered by Janet Quigley in the 1950s, addressed (and continues to address) a blind audience with programmes on employment opportunities and other issues of interest to the blind community.15 Other programmes ostensibly targeted at the blind, like France’s Radio for the Blind and Wireless at the Hospital’s variety shows, ended up being enormously popular with a general audience.16 Blind men and women saw radio not only as providing an opportunity to listen in new ways, but also as opening up potential employment possibilities. In an article titled ‘Radio-Criticism a New Profession for the Blind’, published in Outlook for the Blind, a publication of the American Foundation for the Blind, Marjory Stewart is introduced to readers as a ‘blind radio-critic for the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company’ (1923: 31). The article goes on to describe ‘radio criticism as a profession that is fraught with tremendous possibilities for blind persons of particular endowment’.17 While some blind men and women found traditional occupations like piano tuning and musical accompaniment under threat with the introduction of sound technologies, others saw new opportunities in radio manufacturing, repairs and broadcasting.18 If a radio broadcaster spoke to an unseen audience, then a blind announcer might find themselves at an advantage. Looking beyond the major broadcasting institutions – commercial and public alike – there are glimpses of an even broader range of broadcasters and publics. Here one can discover amateur radio stations run from schools for the blind and letters written to broadcasters by blind men and women outlining programming preferences (Kirkpatrick 2018: 474, 477–8). We also find articles about broadcasting in publications like Outlook for the Blind and first-hand accounts of radio programmes by blind listeners embedded in first-person narratives like Kleege’s. The history of radio broadcasting reveals an alternating process of access and disablement, as well as a broad spectrum of needs, desires, inclusions and exclusions among broadcasters and their listening publics. Technologically driven literary forms like radio drama were shaped by disability metaphors and tropes in ways that could be exploitative and stereotyping, but that also fundamentally reconfigured the imagined audience as disabled, if only temporarily. This understanding of the ‘blind listener’ can serve as a gateway to considering listeners with disabilities on whom broadcasting had a profound impact and who often sought experiences with the medium beyond those intended by its inventors or mainstream practitioners. An approach to modernism and radio that attends to the use of these metaphors and tropes, as well as to sensory and neurodiversity among its users, allows for a deeper understanding of modernist genres like radio drama and their various publics.

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Notes  1. A short list of monographs on Anglophone radio modernism includes Damien Keane (2014), Melissa Dinsman (2015), Emily Bloom (2016), Ian Whittington (2018) and Angela Frattarola (2018); edited collections such as Broadcasting Modernism (ed. Debra Rae Cohen et al., 2009) and Samuel Beckett and BBC Radio: A Reassessment (ed. David Addyman et al., 2017); as well as special issues in the journals Modernist Cultures (ed. Debra Rae Cohen and Michael Coyle, 2015) and Media History (ed. Aasiya Lodhi and Amanda Wrigley, 2018).   2. See Daniel Ryan Morse (2020), Julie Cyzewski (2018) and Jessica Berman (2019).   3. See Maren Tova Linett (2016), Michael Davidson (2019) and Rebecca Sanchez (2015) for recent examples.  4. Early radios were seen, in part, as prosthetic devices for the hard of hearing. Rebecca Scales describes how early radios were deconstructed by hard-of-hearing men and women, and rebuilt as hearing aids (2016: 99-100). For more on disability as a driving force in the development of communication technologies, see Jonathan Sterne (2003) and Mara Mills (2011).  5. For an overview of debates regarding radio’s blindness, see the entry on ‘Blindness’ in Hugh Chignell (2009).  6. Sami Schalk describes three typologies of the ‘supercrip’ narrative – the ‘regular supercrip’ narrative in which someone with disabilities is praised for doing ‘normal’ things; the ‘glorified supercrip’ narrative wherein someone with disabilities performs tasks that most able-bodied people cannot; and ‘the superpowered supercrip’ narrative often seen in comic books where the disabled person discovers extraordinary powers. What I describe as McWhinnie’s use of the supercrip stereotype connects to Schalk’s definition of the ‘glorified supercrip’, in that he ascribes exceptional auditory powers to the blind, which he suggests that the sighted are not capable of attaining.   7. I point out this coincidence only to further emphasise the cross-currents and common discourse between radio and blindness.   8. Special thanks to Neil Verma for bringing ‘Sounds of Darkness’ to my attention. The series ran from 1967 to 1974 on Springbok Radio.  9. The blind villagers in the Escape script also speak with vaguely Hispanic accents even though Nunez, who is from Bogotá, speaks with a US accent. This distinction creates another layer of intimacy between the narrator and the imagined American listening public, and another means of othering the blind villagers. 10. Features began as a research unit in 1924; after the Second World War it was made into an autonomous department led by Laurence Gilliam until his death in 1964 (Lodhi and Wrigley 2018: 162). Feature producers included Louis MacNeice, D. G. Bridson, Edward Sackville-West, Tyrone Guthrie, Lance Sieveking, Mary Hope Allen and W. R. Rodgers. I will not attempt a comprehensive list of modernist writers who wrote Feature programmes here, but the special edition of Media History on ‘Radio Modernisms: Features, Cultures and the BBC’ (2018), edited by Aasiya Lodhi and Amanda Wrigley, provides a helpful overview. 11. The British Wireless for the Blind Fund was organised by the National Institute for the Blind and was presided over by the Prince of Wales. The Fund continues to operate today, providing free audio equipment to blind men and women in the UK. See Matthew Rubery (2016) for more on the organisation’s work with audiobooks. 12. More recently, the popularity of podcasts has renewed discussion of unequal access for deaf audiences in auditory formats. For more on this discussion and resources for podcasting transcription, see the Healing Justice Collective’s Accessibility Guide, available at: (last accessed 24 January 2022).

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13. While there were many women in broadcasting, they were often sequestered in women’s and children’s programming and, with some notable exceptions, were rarely found in leadership positions. For more on women at the BBC see Kate Murphy (2016). 14. For more on radio and ‘colour-blindness’ see Jennifer Lynn Stoever (2016) and Max Shulman (2016). 15. See Kate Murphy (2016) for more on Quigley’s career at the BBC. In 1969, C. Stanley Potter and Robert Watson launched the Minnesota Radio Talking Book Network, which was the first radio reading service in the US. Broadcasting on a subchannel, the service focused on news-reading services for the blind. 16. Rebecca Scales describes how these variety programmes, which aired on France’s commercial stations Radio-Vitus and Radio LL, and the state-run station Paris PTT, were ranked as listener favourites among the general population in a public survey (2016: 79). 17. Stewart appears to have been an in-house critic for Westinghouse. The New Outlook for the Blind describes the duties of the radio critic as providing ‘a consistent check on progammes by eliminating worthless or negligible numbers, and so establishing a system of standardization, and as a medium through which announcers may be schooled in matters of style, pronunciation and so forth’ (‘Radio-Criticism’: 31). 18. One sensational headline from The Evening Journal (1930) read ‘Blind Lose Jobs: Radio Blamed’. In 1923, the French Association Valentin Haüy formed a radio club to offer occupational training programmes for the blind in radio construction and maintenance (Scales 2016: 73–4).

Works Cited Addyman, David, Matthew Feldman and Erik Tonning, eds (2017), Samuel Beckett and BBC Radio: A Reassessment. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ‘Appeal on Behalf of the British Wireless for the Blind Fund’ (1931), Radio Times, 429 (25 December), p. 67. Arnheim, Rudolf (1936), Radio. London: Faber and Faber. Avery, Todd (2006), Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Berman, Jessica (2019), ‘Re-Routing Community: Colonial Broadcasting and the Aesthetics of Relation’, in Modernist Communities Across Cultures and Media, ed. Caroline Pollentier and Sarah Wilson. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. ‘Blind Lose Jobs: Radio Blamed’ (1930), The Evening Journal, 8 March, p. 8. ‘Blind Tales in Old Time Radio’ (n.d.), Old Time Radio Catalog, (last accessed 4 June 2020). Bloom, Emily C. (2016), The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chignell, Hugh (2009), Key Concepts in Radio Studies. Los Angeles: Sage Publications. Cleverdon, Douglas (1969), The Growth of Milk Wood. New York: New Directions. Cohen, Debra Rae and Michael Coyle, eds (2015), ‘Broadcast Traces/Tracing Broadcasting: Modernism and Radio’, Modernist Cultures, 10: 1. Cohen, Debra Rae, Michael Coyle and Jane Lewty, eds (2009), Broadcasting Modernism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Cyzewski, Julie (2018), ‘Broadcasting Nature Poetry: Una Marson and the BBC’s Overseas Service’, PMLA, 133: 3, pp. 575–93. Davidson, Michael (2019), Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic. New York: Oxford University Press. Davis, Lennard J. (1995), Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. New York: Verso.

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Dinsman, Melissa (2015), Modernism at the Microphone: Radio, Propaganda, and Literary Aesthetics During World War II. New York: Bloomsbury. Dunkel, John (1947), ‘The Country of the Blind’, Escape, directed by William N. Robson. CBS, Radio Broadcast. Ellcessor, Elizabeth, Mack Hagood and Bill Kirkpatrick (2017), ‘Introduction: Toward a Disability Media Studies’, in Disability Media Studies. New York: New York University Press, pp. 1–26. Frattarola, Angela (2018), Modernist Soundscapes: Auditory Technology and the Novel. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Guralnick, Elissa S. (1996), Sight Unseen: Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard, and Other Contemporary Dramatists on Radio. Athens: Ohio University Press. Hamraie, Aimi and Kelly Fritsch (2019), ‘Crip Technoscience Manifesto’, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 5: 1, pp. 1–34. Jay, Martin (1993), Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. Keane, Damien (2014), Ireland and the Problem of Information: Irish Writing, Radio, Late Modernist Communication. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Kirkpatrick, Bill (2018), ‘Disability, Cultural Accessibility, and the Radio Archive’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 16: 4, pp. 473–80. Kleege, Georgina (1999), Sight Unseen. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Linett, Maren Tova (2016), Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lodhi, Aasiya and Amanda Wrigley, eds (2018), ‘Radio Modernisms: Features, Cultures and the BBC’, Media History, 24: 2, pp. 159–65. McWhinnie, Donald (1959), The Art of Radio. London: Faber and Faber. Michalko, Rod (2010), ‘What’s Cool about Blindness?’, Disability Studies Quarterly 30: 3/4, (last accessed 2 February 2020). Mills, Mara (2011), ‘Hearing Aids and the History of Electronics Miniaturization’, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 33: 2, pp. 24–44. Mills, Mara (2015), ‘Technology’, in Keywords for Disability Studies, ed. Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss and David Serlin. New York: New York University Press, pp. 176–9. Mitchell, David T. and Sharon L. Snyder (2000), Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Morse, Daniel Ryan (2020), Radio Empire: The BBC’s Eastern Service and the Emergence of the Global Anglophone Novel. New York: Columbia University Press. Murphy, Kate (2016), Behind the Wireless: A History of Women at the BBC. New York: Palgrave. O’Shaughnessy, Brian (1967), ‘Traitor Beware’ (7 July), directed by Gerrie van Wyk, The Sounds of Darkness, SABC- Springbok Radio, (last accessed 2 February 2020). Parrinder, Patrick (1990), ‘Wells’s Cancelled Endings for “The Country of the Blind”’, Science Fiction Studies, 17: 1, pp. 71–6. ‘Radio-Criticism a New Profession for the Blind’ (1923), Outlook for the Blind, 17: 1, p. 31. Rubery, Matthew (2016), The Untold Story of the Talking Book. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sanchez, Rebecca (2015), Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature. New York: New York University Press. Scales, Rebecca P. (2016), Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921–1939. New York: Cambridge University Press. Schalk, Sami (2016), ‘Reevaluating the Supercrip’, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 10: 1, pp. 71–86.

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Shulman, Max (2016), ‘Tuning the Black Voice: Colour-Deafness and the American Negro Theatre’s Radio Dramas’, Modern Drama, 59: 4, pp. 456–77. Sterne, Jonathan (2003), The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stoever, Jennifer Lynn (2016), The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening. New York: New York University Press. Thomas, Dylan (1954), Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices. New York: New Directions. Verma, Neil (2012), Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Whittington, Ian (2018), Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics and the BBC, 1939–1945. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ‘Wireless for the Blind’ (1939), Radio Times, 847 (25 December), p. 30.

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14 Music: Modernist Remediation and Technologies of Listening Josh Epstein

L

udwig van Beethoven, if not exactly a modernist, offers ample fodder for modern artists looking to defend – or expand – their turf. While producing City Lights (1928), Charlie Chaplin responded to the newly popular ‘talkies’ by proclaiming that ‘Moving pictures need sound as much as Beethoven symphonies need lyrics’ (qtd in Crafton 1999: 296). It might be tempting to retort that Beethoven’s last symphony did have lyrics – and still turned out okay – but taking Chaplin’s maxim seriously is more useful (if less instantly gratifying) than the easy dismissal. Chaplin, who composed the score to City Lights, understood the supple relationship between image and music even in the ‘silent’ picture (which, as film historians repeatedly note, was never truly silent). Music in 1920s film was increasingly tasked with sustaining the narrative development, on-screen action and extra-diegetic affect of films such as City Lights, itself part pantomime and part melodrama (literally, ‘music-drama’). Chaplin’s later score for Modern Times (1936), a sort of semi-talkie, enhanced these tensions: the main love theme, influenced by Puccini’s Tosca and written to narrate the Tramp’s refuge from technology in the arms of sentimental domesticity, attached to the popular imagination two decades later as the popular song ‘Smile’. From operatic melodrama to silent film melodrama to melos without drama, this music was churned through a dialectical factory-wheel to which lyrics added considerable exchange value. Emerging alongside Chaplin’s melodramatic pantomimes were ‘city-symphonies’ by Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929), Walter Ruttmann (Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, 1927), Fritz Lang (Metropolis, 1927) and Alberto Cavalcanti (Rien que les heures, 1926), as well as avant-garde experiments such as Fernand Léger’s Ballet mécanique, which features Chaplin (‘Charlot’) in puppet form. Even without the noisy accompaniment of George Antheil’s score, composed and performed independently for pianolas, sirens, electric bells and percussion, the film’s gestures to Chaplin invoke the rhythmic physicality of a ‘mechanical ballet’ and disrupt any pretence to pure formal abstraction. Films had sound, whether they ‘needed’ it or not: the presence of music and speech was not silenced by film but reanimated by it and helped to act on the sensorium in unexpected ways. This chapter examines how modernist radio and film remediate musical expression, not only leveraging music’s appeals to sentiment but representing music as a media technology in its own right. I focus primarily on two films produced by the British General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit: Stuart Legg’s BBC: The Voice of Britain (1936), featuring a set-piece in which Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is performed for

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a broadcast audience, and Humphrey Jennings’s Listen to Britain (1942; edited by Stewart McAllister). By depicting the performance and broadcasting of music in a different medium, these films remediate the technological propensities embedded in musical sound, using the technologies of cinema to extend those propensities further. Modernist composers conceived of their own music as something technological, wired into the material networks of communication, machinery and infrastructure that we reflexively associate with ‘modernity’. Before turning to Legg and Jennings, then, some attention is due to the intermedial aesthetics of modernist music, which the GPO films extend: though the music in Jennings’s and Legg’s films is not modernist (Beethoven, Mozart, dance music, Welsh folk song), it is rendered modernist in effect through exactly such hybridised juxtapositions of genre and medium.

Modernist Music as Media Modernist texts seek ways to transport the voice across media and spatio-temporal limits. In perhaps the most canonical modernist example, T. S. Eliot’s typist, listening to ‘a record on the gramophone’ in the aftermath of an indifferent assault, exemplifies modernists’ preoccupations with recorded music, as it remediates a subject’s recuperation from trauma, and dissociation from her own voice, by inscribing distant voices on to the perceptual texture of the present. Decades later, at the tail end of ‘modernism’ as conventionally defined, the protagonist of Francis Poulenc’s La Voix humaine (1958), named Elle, talks to her former lover on the telephone, and hears the sounds of a jazz record emanating from the other end. The audience does not quite listen along with her; as in Cocteau’s original 1928 stage play and Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera The Telephone (1947), and in the tradition of radio dramas such as Lucille Fletcher’s Sorry, Wrong Number (1943), we hear only Elle’s reactions to the conversation and to the failures of the technology. We participate partially in Elle’s aural discovery, however. An outburst of classicised jazz locating Elle’s ‘ex’ in a new lover’s home marks a moment of semi-diegetic music: an orchestral imitation of what she hears, and an interruption of the opera’s formal self-containment, as if to echo the telephone’s fragmentary effects. Dropped calls, hang-ups and wrong numbers limn a failed human connection and an alienated relationship with technology (marked even by the name/ pronoun ‘Elle’). This ‘monodrama’ soon turns melodrama, as Elle pleads insanity and dies, strangled by the telephone cord. La Voix re-enacts recurring modernist concerns about technologies that may expand the cultural status of music or threaten its aura. Elle’s singing voice both signals her instability and awakens modernist anxieties about the ‘material practices and technologies through which voices become audible’ (Weidman 2013: 236). In short, La Voix alerts us to the technological character of music itself. Poulenc imbues his onstage and offstage music, and Elle’s description of the music she hears, with all the qualities of a technology that mediates information and interacts with other technologies. Entwined with Elle’s elliptical narrative, the telephone’s mediations are remediated by Poulenc’s music, tasked with both the narrative work of filling in half of a conversation and the thematic work of redoubling Elle’s alienation. Inasmuch as the orchestra and Elle’s voice must suggest an acoustic presence on the other end of the line, these sounds mediate the act of listening; Elle’s singing and the orchestral accompaniment must do the work of recomposing Elle’s disjointed auditory engagement.

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Poulenc and Cocteau had long participated in a modernist musical milieu that synthesised art with technology. The scandalous 1917 Ballets Russes production of Erik Satie’s Parade reinvents ubiquitous media images in order to uproot aesthetic hierarchies and ‘reconfigur[e] the fashionable life’ (Davis 2006: 129). Satie’s mechanical noises, musical loops and parodies of ragtime complement Cocteau’s scenario, drawn from a barrage of popular American media: ‘The Titanic – “Nearer My God to Thee” . . . The New York Herald . . . gramophones . . . posters . . . Charlie Chaplin’ (qtd in Perloff 1991: 113). The media savvy of Les Six – a group of composers, including Poulenc, known for their fashionable ‘lifestyle modernism’ and distaste for the ‘sauce’ of nineteenth-century music – yielded compositions such as Arthur Honegger’s Pacific 231 (1923), an orchestral homage to the locomotive, and Les Mariés sur la Tour Eiffel (1921), a ballet collaboratively composed by five of Les Six in which ‘human gramophones’ comment on a series of tableaux vivants. The soundscape is no mere ‘background’ for dramatic action: the music and the gesturing body simulate the presence of other visual, textual and recording media. A text, such as La Voix or Parade, that is openly intermedial – situated between different media and their clashing ‘signifying systems’ (Clements 2019: 46)1 – understands music as a technology in both form (as media begin to resemble each other) and function (as we experience these technologies’ alienating effects). ‘All mediation’, Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin write, ‘is remediation’: each medium enters into ‘relationships of respect and rivalry with other media’, just as a medium’s ‘representational power’ presumes familiarity with a media ecology (2000 [1999]: 65). Modernist art partakes in a similar ‘heightening [of] medial awareness’ (Murphet 2009: 4). Sara Danius (2002) argues that as the modernist novel reconstructs a crisis of perception, it approximates a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, contending with compartmentalised sense experiences by abstracting and then subsuming them into a genre-bending synthesis. Danius’s theatrical analogy suggests that modernist aesthetic forms – literary, musical, visual and cinematic – are constantly staging a confrontation with modernity’s sensory assaults, through explicit reference or through immanent formal development. Julian Murphet notes that the figureheads of the European avant-garde (Marinetti, Ball, Apollinaire, Tzara), and later artists whom they influenced, were ‘aware of themselves as media artifacts’ (2009: 4), an apt description of musical as well as literary practices. The so-called Bruitistes accompanied asemantic ‘sound poetry’ with mechanical noises, turning the poet-performer’s body into an anti-technological technology, a resonant mediator for sounds that recuperate (often through primitivist kitsch) an essential irrationality. In Futurist texts such as F. T. Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tumb (1914) and Luigi Russolo’s manifesto, The Art of Noise (1913), and composition Awakening of a City (1914), the sensationalised noises of mechanised warfare are glorified as the basis of a sonic art that ‘conquer[s] the infinite variety of noise-sounds’ (Russolo 1986 [1913]: 25). Futurist music aimed to explode music’s autonomy by heightening its contradictions, using the noisy soundscape to break down Art-with-a-capital-A, which built its ‘respectability’ on acoustic technologies and cultural norms that excluded noise (or tried to) from both stage and audience (Bailey 1998). The noises of Futurism and Bruitisme were absorbed by French and Anglo-American musical modernists, including and beyond Cocteau, Poulenc and Les Six. Edgard Varèse’s Amériques (1926), a homage to New York City in which duck-calls and air-raid sirens share space with the conventional orchestra, was an instant sensation. Antheil’s riot-inducing

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concert versions of Ballet mécanique earned him the fandom of the Anglo-American modernist literati, including Pound, Yeats, Joyce and one Hedy Lamarr (with whom Antheil collaborated on a ‘frequency-hopping’ torpedo patent). Though defended by the composer in the language of neoclassical formalism, Antheil’s Ballet mécanique prompted a noisy debate over the relationships between music and capitalism, joined by Ezra Pound’s tracts comparing the piece to a musical factory (Epstein 2014). William Carlos Williams felt that, with Antheil’s help, they had ‘gone up over’ the noise of the New York subway (qtd in Thompson 2002: 143); Antheil’s music seemed to recalibrate the ‘audile technique’ of urban listening.2 At the centre of this soundscape was jazz, soon to become, in Geoffrey Jacques’s words, ‘a standard against which the modernity of other art forms was measured’ (2001: 74). Especially early in the century, ‘jazz’ encompassed a multifaceted range of idioms that, in their mass-distributed forms, served as a ‘transmitter’ of verbal conventions – vernacular dialects and minstrelsy ‘cross-talk’ – coextensive with the linguistic hybridity of modernism (Jacques 2009: 14, 78; North 1994). Perhaps because the term itself is so elastic, jazz found itself appreciated and appropriated by the European avant-garde in overdetermined ways. Glorified and vilified as a symptom of war trauma and mechanised city life, both celebrated as raw emotional expression and fetishised as a kindred spirit to the ‘anti-art’ sensibilities of Futurism, Dada and Cocteauvian ‘lifestyle modernism’, jazz was ‘affixed to . . . activities of the avant-garde like a decal on a traveler’s bag’ (Rasula 2003: 14). Modernist music, and jazz specifically, was thus positioned as a technological intervention into a ‘battle over the significance and value of modernity’ (Chinitz 2000: 10). Modernist studies has (mercifully) abandoned the rhetoric of a ‘cultural divide’ that exempts ‘high art’ from the technological dependencies of popular art – or has worked to historicise the vested interests that invented such a divide. Discourses of ‘absolute’ music (music that claims no extramusical ‘meaning’) are no less subject to technological mediation, both extensional (sound recording) and intensional (the technical means of musical language). The experiments of the Second Viennese School, conceived not as an avant-garde attack on art so much as an extension of Austro-German Romanticism, struck Theodor Adorno as a ‘musical technology’ that revealed the mutual dependence between technical discipline and a ‘blind state of nature’ (2002 [1934]: 207). As Arved Ashby (2010) argues, the ethos of sound recording supports an ‘absolute’ ideal of music by rendering a sound autonomous from its context. This severing heightens questions of authenticity, performance style, subjective sense-memory and textuality with which music contends. As Rick Altman writes, with respect to film sound, ‘Recordings do not reproduce sound, they represent sound’ (1992: 40): a recording is an interpretation and inscription of the sound’s performed materiality. For Igor Stravinsky, who ostensibly resisted individual interpretations of his music, a recording was functionally ‘coincident with the work without . . . displacing or replacing it’ (Ashby 2010: 201–2). Stravinsky’s formalism, in any case, was a rhetorical posture as much as a compositional practice. His fascination with Russian folk traditions invokes contemporaries such as Béla Bartók, Leoš Janáček and Percy Grainger, for whom the phonograph was not only a tool to preserve ‘authorial intention’ but a means of investigating indigenous vernaculars. In these and other ways, the modernist musical text represents a technology of form built on technologies of performance, recording, distribution and ethnography. Modernist music – however ‘absolute’ in conception – is remediation all the way down.

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The GPO: Documenting Musical Intermediality The intermedial qualities of opera, film, ballet and narrative radio give an additional thrust to music’s technological character, employing new musical noises and actively representing music as a social actor; exploiting the affective qualities of music (as in non-diegetic background music); and making visible its technological circulation. If cinema was often imagined, after Kandinsky, as the telos of the synaesthetic total artwork (Murphet 2009: 147–8), modernist films often defamiliarise their own synthesis, unfolding a dialectic between the artwork and its material substructure. The technological self-awareness of these films, like that of Parade or Les Mariés, produces what Matthew Wilson Smith (2007) calls the ‘crystalline’ total artwork: one that foregrounds its own ‘hypermediacy’ by spotlighting its multiple constituent media (of which some, like cinema, seemed ‘total’ to begin with). Similarly, Legg’s BBC: The Voice of Britain and Jennings’s Listen to Britain capitalise on the effects of music while characterising the technological structures that disseminate it. As Janice Ho argues in her contribution to this volume, GPO Film Unit documentaries formally represent a social contract defined by the technologies and media that bind a citizenry. This ideal of mediated citizenship motivates the use of musical noise and rhythm in several GPO productions. In Harry Watt’s Night Mail (1936), a paean to the postal train, a W. H. Auden poem is accompanied by Benjamin Britten’s noisy score using industrial objects as percussion. Just as it muddies distinctions between diegetic and non-diegetic sound, Night Mail ‘redraws geographical and intersubjective boundaries’ through intermedial rhythmic play (Milian 2019). Jennings, too, juxtaposed ‘art music’ with provincial music and industrial noises; films such as Spare Time (1939) critique the pressures of wartime production by creating separate ‘sonic spaces’ that use ‘musical temporality [as] refuge from the noisy reality of modern life’ (Claydon 2011:183; Mansell 2011: 166). The GPO’s artistic and ideological rifts, though beyond my present scope, offer additional context for Legg’s and Jennings’s uses of music. Sensibilities clashed, for example, over the relative merits of ‘city-symphony’ films such as Ruttmann’s Berlin and Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. Directors who championed a realist aesthetic, such as Paul Rotha, found these films too ideologically vague to effect social reform; Night Mail seemed to Rotha to have ‘no social purpose whatsoever’ (qtd in Richards 2011: 3). John Grierson, who admired Eisenstein but found Vertov’s films aimless, left the Unit in 1937, dismayed with its new direction. With the hiring of Surrealists including Jennings and Cavalcanti, the GPO gravitated away from documentary realism toward experiments with montage and sound-image counterpoint, influenced by Vertov’s deployment of music as both method and diegetic subject. Man with a Movie Camera, for example, opens with the tuning of an orchestra; the conductor and players await the projectionist, their motions captured and conducted into being by the film strip, which is then pruned throughout the film’s narrative (Roberts 2000: 49–50). GPO films, too, use music as a symbol of national community and institutional command, a self-aware technological actor marshalled for cultural repair. Though neither Legg’s nor Jennings’s film employs modernist music, both remediate ‘classical’ music as a modernist form within a modern media ecology. Beethoven serves as Legg’s primary example of musical sublimity, reracinated by the sounds of politics. Listen to Britain cross-fertilises the industrial, military and urban sounds of Blitz-era London

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with music-hall numbers, Welsh folk songs (‘The Ash Grove’), North American folk songs (Canadian soldiers singing ‘Home on the Range’) and Mozart. Through layered remediations, Legg and Jennings defamiliarise how the production of music feeds into ‘second-nature’ daily rituals – which, in times of national distress, may have ceased to feel natural and found themselves in need of reconstruction. Aiming to cultivate public listening habits and shape a coherent ‘imagined community’ of tuned-in listeners, BBC music programming served as a support system for cultural production. The BBC programme Music While You Work, which Listen to Britain quotes directly, designed its programming to increase industrial productivity in concert with the rhythms of the working body.3 Synchronising the BBC with images of labour, Legg and Jennings weave music into a process through which British subjects constitute, in lived time, a cohesive public that both whistles and listens while they work. Simultaneously, these films strive to preserve music’s integrity as a (contingently) self-sufficient medium through which citizens can realise themselves. Voice and Listen reconstruct music as a ‘technology of the self’: a mediated ‘cultural resource’ that actors ‘mobilize for their ongoing self-construction’ (DeNora 1999: 32).

Conducting the Voices of Britain ‘Classical’ music fit the BBC’s pedagogical aims for the new medium. Promoting the BBC as a ‘sustained endeavour to . . . build up knowledge, experience and character’, founding Director General John Reith argued that programming ‘high-brow’ music would popularise it to the improvement of national tastes (qtd in Doctor 1999: 27–8). This approach would, Reith hoped, prove democratic, enabling the ‘shepherd on the downs, or the lonely crofter in the farthest Hebrides’ to ‘sit side by side with the patron of the stalls and hear some of the best performances in the world’ (BBC Handbook [1928], qtd in Scannell 1981: 244). The programming of modernist composers (including those discussed above) met with mixed responses, but rather than change the programming, the BBC supplemented it with the Radio Times, The Listener, school pamphlets and listener handbooks (Scannell 1981: 245; Briggs 1995 [1965]: 181–2). According to Debra Rae Cohen, the BBC constructed its ‘voice’ intermedially through collaborations of sound and print, propping its public image on The Listener, which endeavoured to train listeners as discriminating ‘aural citizen[s]’ (2012: 579). And if The Listener was used to ‘assuage anxieties about broadcasting’ with ‘oracular’ pronouncements about the ‘magic of radio’, it did so only by ‘eliminat[ing] that “noise” that validates the radio signal’ and ‘underscore[s] its immediacy’ (Cohen 2012: 585). In the late 1920s, the conductor Edward Clark pulled off successful radio performances of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat (1918) and Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire (1912) and Gurre-Lieder (1913), showing that British listeners were prepared to engage with the ‘new music’ (even the proudly late Romantic music of Gurre-Lieder offers its share of challenges for listeners). After the hiring of Adrian Boult as Music Director in 1930, the BBC Symphony Orchestra emerged as a world-class ensemble; the BBC established a concert hall in Broadcasting House for both live and broadcast audiences (Briggs 1995 [1965]: 164–5). While underscoring the BBC’s confidence in its musicians, Voice presents the production of culture, ‘high’ and ‘low’, as an interactive process, tempering the BBC’s self-seriousness with a playful respect for the music itself.4 And as Legg accompanies Boult’s performance with images of the Radio Times

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flying off the presses, music’s intermediality both broadens its civic influence and leaves it more prone to desacralisation. A film that depicts, à la Joyce or Woolf, a ‘day in the life’ of BBC operations, Voice emphasises the ‘unifying and integrative nature’ of radio (Richards 2011: 7), counterpointing Beethoven with comedy acts, dance music, children’s programming and a production of Macbeth (featuring a baby-faced Jennings as a Weïrd Sister). A series of opening dissolve cuts introduces Reith’s pontifical inscription on Broadcasting House, which in workmanlike Latin dedicates ‘[t]his temple of the arts and muses . . . to Almighty God’ with a prayer that ‘the people inclining their ear to whatsoever things are beautiful and honest and of good report may tread the path of virtue and wisdom’. The film then pivots to the sounds of a morning service, dubbed over images of rural citizens listening on the wireless. Returning to the BBC offices, the mail is sorted, the contradictory injunctions of complaint letters heard in choric voiceovers (‘More variety! Less variety!’) as an army of typists responds. A ‘gramophone specialist’ tries, and then destroys, a crooning new record; professional ‘practisers of noise’ prepare noisemaking devices for Macbeth; a voiceover extols the station’s extensive gramophone library; a producer casually eats an apple during the ‘Dancing Daughters’. The studio work is treated with more irony than reverence – a tone that throws into relief, if only temporarily, the gravitas of Beethoven’s Fifth. If the choice of this symphonic warhorse, rather than Schoenberg or Poulenc, avoids debates over the niche appeal of ‘modern’ music, it accentuates a recurring modernist interest in Beethoven’s music. In an excellent recent monograph, Nathan Waddell reads ‘Beethovenian’ modernism as both a Romantic challenge to ‘restrictive aesthetic norms’ and a ‘valuing of the artist as a socially and politically transformative figure’ (2020: 6). Literary modernists ‘buried’ Beethoven in their work, showing how ‘music seemingly available for all to enjoy is bound up with the economic hierarchies it is so often said to transcend’ (Waddell 2020: 49). In E. M. Forster’s Howards End, a narrator remarks that ‘all sorts and conditions are satisfied’ by Beethoven’s Fifth, proceeding to show competing interpretations of its ‘sublime noise’ being ‘broadcast’ over a metaphorical ‘field of battle’ (Forster 1998 [1910]: 25). Similarly, Legg’s BBC extends outward, showing the music’s production and then mapping out a cultural ‘field’ over which it is ‘broadcast’. This field, and its ‘hierarchies’, matriculate into the rest of the film; Boult’s performance is ‘bound up with’ the radio’s daily operations, as the BBC’s social mission is bound with the music’s immanent tensions. This set-piece reads as a defence of reflective listening – the interruption of which does not devalue music, but humanises it, reintegrating it with other fare and with the ‘sorts and conditions’ listening back. Legg frames the Beethoven performance with images of medial self-consciousness, at the scenes of both production and reception. A voiceover names the four movements of Beethoven’s Fifth as the presses churn out the Radio Times. Accompanied by an oscillating chime, an announcer lists imperial outposts where the broadcast will be heard. We then hear the voice of Reith – a somewhat sinister radio talk promoting the Empire Service, which promises to induce ‘greater sympathy’ to imperial subjects across the globe. Legg cross-hatches a synthesis between technological infrastructure and musical performance: first, a series of angular cuts between orchestra musicians and radio engineers (Figure 14.1) – complete with the whirring howls of the technology generating the signal – then Boult and his antenna-like baton empowered by a series of low-angle shots (Figures 14.2–3). Interrupted briefly by a hand at a dial panel (Figure 14.4), Boult’s con-

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Figure 14.1  BBC Engineer, in BBC: The Voice of Britain, dir. Stuart Legg (BFI).

Figure 14.2  Sir Adrian Boult conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, in BBC: The Voice of Britain.

Figure 14.3  Sir Adrian Boult’s baton giving a downbeat in BBC: The Voice of Britain. ducting downbeat – and Beethoven’s opening motif – create a circuit among the technology of broadcast, the body of an engineer, and the body and baton of Boult himself. The music runs for some five minutes, dubbed first over fragmentary shots of the orchestra, then over images of domestic ‘attentive listeners’, explicitly linking the players to their fellow citizens in whose ears and name the music resonates.

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Figure 14.4  Hand of a BBC engineer during Beethoven performance, in BBC: The Voice of Britain. The symphony’s generative power is thus remediated by the signals that disseminate it for (global) consumption. Having established the BBC’s imperial cultural heft, Beethoven’s music opens into the spheres of politics; as in Forster, the music generates unifying connectivity which is dispersed into conflicting modes of reception. Formally, the disorienting cuts and angles that establish Boult’s dominance also create an effect of distraction rather than ‘attentive’ absorption. Beethoven’s music is interrupted, moreover, by an SOS signal to a trawler at sea, interrupting sublimity with the contingencies of work. Legg presents a litany of ‘leaders of opinion’ in closeup, including H. G. Wells on the conditions of socialist Russia, and a wry speech by George Bernard Shaw proclaiming that the ‘microphone is the most wonderful tell-tale in the world’, a medium that renders a politician’s (in)sincerity immediately detectable. Once Beethoven and Boult fade, ‘high culture’ gives way to Henry Hall’s Dance Band, over shots of a policeman on his beat and a couple unceremoniously necking on the street. In a final sequence, a pacing father tells his son to stop whistling along with the performers on air. Boult’s reign does not run here; music now produces not reverent absorption, but immodesty and restlessness, the voice (and lips) of a whistling bandleader reflexively mimicked by those of distracted listeners. Interrupted by naval exigencies and boat races, Boult’s conducting hand, and Reith’s extended imperial handshake, are subsumed – with a few ironic remainders – into quotidian rituals. Beethoven and Boult may not generate the ‘attentive listening’ behaviours meant to edify public taste, but they do conduct productive listening habits. By treating music as both an object of representation and an acoustic substructure, The Voice of Britain capitalises on music’s emotional force while connecting it to a material process. The film presents music as a mediation of the labour of production, used to make both trifles and ‘warhorses’, and the cultural labour of reception, performed by those domestic subjects whom radio music proposes to ‘educate’. In practice, the film enacts the dialectic articulated by Walter Benjamin (1969 [1936]): if the aura of Boult’s performance aestheticises politics, that aura is abruptly punctured by material noises and collisions, allowing a listening public to absorb (rather than be absorbed by) the sacralised artwork.

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Listening (Out) to Britain: Music and Civic Soundscape Beginning his career as a Surrealist painter, poet and literary critic (trained by I. A. Richards) before cofounding the ethnographic group Mass Observation, Jennings long understood media forms as interdependent. His unfinished anthology, Pandaemonium, organises a literary history of the Industrial Revolution as ‘images . . . in an unrolling film’, exploring the history of the senses and the structures of feeling5 revealed in writing. Sound and music provide a pulse for this rhythmic literary montage, which juxtaposes Samuel Pepys on the nature of sound and Daines Barrington on birdsong, Robert Hooke’s experiments with vibration and John Tyndall’s comparisons of air disturbances in vowels and consonants. Pandaemonium hears music as a physical disturbance of matter and as raw material for the imagination, a dialectic that ‘unrolls’ alongside the engines of capital. Jennings’s film aesthetic draws from these same Surrealist and materialist instincts, and in particular, the use of formal and generic ambiguity to destabilise ‘referential or functional aspects’ of concrete ‘found objects’ (Miller 2002: 232). In Jennings’s and Len Lye’s Birth of a Robot, an animated film made for ShellMex, puppets in the vestments of Roman gods use high-grade motor oil to ‘lubricate’ a dead motorist back to life in the Egyptian deserts. Lye uses the music of Gustav Holst’s The Planets, likewise a synthesis of nostalgic mythology and outward exploration, to enact oneiric free-play rooted in the object-world: an aesthetic that meets the material needs and medial self-awareness of both advertising and surrealism. If Jennings’s version of surrealism feeds into late modernists’ ‘anthropological turn’ – a reversal of modernism’s fractured imperialist gaze on to a self-examination of England’s own rituals (Esty 2004) – Listen to Britain takes a similarly dialectical tack, using concrete sonic particulars to unfold patterns of musical production and consumption. For Thomas Davis, Listen to Britain absorbs the ruptures of wartime within a broader sense of everyday ordinariness, suggesting that ‘even a day at war is not all that extraordinary’ (Davis 2015: 45), and constructs this sense of the ordinary through the formal approximation of consensus, which compensates for the impoverishment of visible meaning. That consensus is reconstructed in the modality of the audible – in intersubjective acts of ‘listening out’ (Lacey 2013) that constitute the public sphere. Listen to Britain expands this intersubjectivity of listening across the spheres of work, play and education – creating a total artwork while preserving the porous openness of sound in the world. Jennings connects a playground clapping routine, lovingly surveilled by a woman nearby (Figure 14.5), to military preparations – the work these children may some day join – through distorted sounds of engine noise and Bren gun carriers. As we move into a montage of travel – starting with a plane’s-eye-view of the English landscape, cutting to a lorry moving forward through a tunnel as a train horizontally crosses the screen – we hear the music of ‘Calling All Workers’, Eric Coates’s rousing theme to Music While You Work, over the ‘keynote sound’ of helicopters.6 An assembly line of women factory workers sing along as ‘Yes, My Darling Daughter’ is piped through a speaker (Figure 14.6), which sets the beat for the assembly line and the singing workers (in that order) (Figure 14.7). Work, study, play and war, moving along the X, Y and Z visual axes, create a shared habitus of listening, conducted by the BBC. This factory sequence pivots on an ‘acousmatic’ voice: a sound without a visible presence. Acousmatic sound, as Brian Kane writes, functions as a ‘node in the tensile

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Figure 14.5  Schoolyard round game, in Listen to Britain, dir. Humphrey Jennings and ed. Stewart McAllister (BFI).

Figure 14.6  Factory loudspeaker, in Listen to Britain.

Figure 14.7  Women singing to Music While You Work, in Listen to Britain. mesh of a form of life’, a ‘point where disparate auditory and cultural practices intersect’ (2014: 226). Here, a loudspeaker amplifies the materiality of this ‘mesh’, disciplining us to listen to the ‘absolute’ sound-object, while recalling the phantasmagoric technology that occludes its material source (Kane 2014: 119–20). Jennings’s depiction of sound piped through speakers connects the music to affective and economic

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mobilisations of war, an act of mediated listening both compulsory and voluntary, conducted by an invisible voice in defence against an unseen enemy. Music While You Work (hereafter MWYW) was initiated in 1940 in response to a concern that as women’s labour grew increasingly repetitive, production and morale would diminish. As Keith Jones (2010) and Christina Baade (2012) have detailed, the implementation of MWYW on the BBC and in the factories (and, eventually, for home listeners) was provoked by a surge of studies in the 1930s and 1940s speculating on how music might ease boredom and obviate the need for frequent breaks. MWYW, Baade writes, was based on ‘research in industrial efficiency that focused on workers’ bodies, psychology and welfare; and the conviction that, in a state of total war, the contributions of every citizen mattered’ (2012: 61). BBC administrators used listener research surveys and interviews with factory workers and managers to parse the effects of musical elements – tempo, rhythm, melody – on workplace productivity. Managers hoped that MWYW might ‘restore the rhythm of the work within the chaos of mechanical din’, though new acoustic and practical difficulties emerged (Bijsterveld 2008: 87). Wynford Reynolds, the first producer, claimed in a 1942 directive that MWYW would have the effect of a cup of tea, a ‘tonic’ for worker morale (qtd in Kirkpatrick 1942) – as long as the music was neither too spiritual nor too sentimental, neither too rubato nor too syncopated. The complex rhythms of ‘hot’ music, Reynolds warned, would create ‘a confusion of sound’ that interfered with the rhythms of workers’ bodies and machines, building on a ‘deeply rooted symbolism of sound which associated noise with chaos and rhythm with order’ (Bijsterveld 2006: 327). MWYW was conscripted in the service of health, tasked with increasing (without overstimulating) the body’s output. Such efforts to standardise workers’ bodies, and nurture the body politic, buttress Jennings’s images of cheerful labourers tunefully whistling along to a speaker that regulates their movements from afar. This factory scene thus represents an administered technology of production, conducted by the acousmêtre. If, as Baade argues (quoting Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish), MWYW ‘subjected music to a “mechanics of power” in order to render it useful to the war effort’ and made itself akin to ‘the systems of factory discipline that transformed workers into docile bodies’ (2012: 66), Jennings locates this internalised docility in the mediated structure of listening itself, placing music not outside but at the nexus of technology and labour. The injunction to ‘listen to Britain’ enjoins us also to listen to listening, to hear music as part of an ongoing process of cultural labour both patriotic and disciplinary. Listen to Britain’s most formally innovative moment occurs when Jennings transitions from the music hall, featuring the comic duo of Flanagan and Allen singing ‘Underneath the Arches’, to a performance in London’s National Gallery of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 17 in G major, K.453, by pianist Myra Hess and the Royal Air Force Orchestra. Moving from an interactive ritual to a solemn one, Jennings connects two forms of listening through a musical pivot chord: the penultimate dominant chord of the music-hall song is Mozart’s tonic chord. Jennings claimed this to be a happy accident of editing, nurturing his Surrealist faith that unconscious structures reveal themselves in material coincidences. What Grierson called the ‘umbilical cord’ between spectator and state, his ideal for documentary film, is here replaced with what we might playfully term an umbilical chord – a modulating musical resonance that binds, without equating, listening habitus of different classes.

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If ‘high’ and popular art are ‘torn halves of an integral freedom to which, however, they do not add up’ (Adorno 1977 [1936]: 123), to connect high and popular forms through the umbilical chord of listening is to fashion a synthesis that unfolds its own social tensions. From rear-angle shots of Flanagan and Allen playfully conducting their audience, Jennings cuts to medium-shots of the active spectators, then to shots of the National Gallery’s exterior, then to its interior. As a counterpoint to Flanagan and Allen’s participatory whistlers, Hess’s audience listens blissfully, sanctified by the presence of the Queen Mother (smiling with arms folded) alongside a wounded soldier and an economically diverse audience. Hess’s lunchtime Gallery concerts, which cost a shilling, were noted for their cross-class appeal and cosmopolitan programming7 – a reputation confirmed by a shot of the programme, which features Mozart, Smetana and Howard Ferguson (Four Diversions on Ulster Airs [1942], newly composed for the BBC in Northern Ireland). The Steinway piano, revealed in a deep-focused shot from the audience, features as a mediator of this internationalism: a material instrument and a synecdoche for the ‘House of Steinway’ (founded in 1850s New York by a German immigrant), and no less a cosmopolitan technology than radar or radio. The image of Hess (a Steinway loyalist) at the piano produces music as a network of auditory mediations. The film closes by merging material technologies with idealised music: over a shot of metal being forged, a chorus of ‘Rule, Britannia!’ fades in asynchronously with shots of the earth and air. ‘Rule, Britannia!’, like the title of the film, speaks in the imperative mood, instructing the Empire to rule itself through acoustic introspection. Presenting the ‘voice of Britain’ as an acousmatic collective, this chorus can be heard as non-diegetic (externally imposed) or diegetic (produced by land and sky, sublated from the noises of labour and aerial warfare). In either reading, the anthem frames the music of Britain as a remediated artefact, by acknowledging (through violation) the artificiality of the film’s formal premise, or by unpacking the material sounds and social practices that produce this ethereal chorus. The final frame presents a snippet of ‘Rule, Britannia!’, in the key of B-flat, overlaid by a cannon crossed over a violin. The musical notation ends not with the song’s final words, however, but with the leading tone: the A-natural, corresponding with the word ‘waves’, that a listener expects resolved to the tonic (Figure 14.8). Closing mid-thought, this musical image attenuates the film’s final words – ‘Britons never, ever shall be slaves’ – a message that, like the title of Jennings’s London Can Take It! (1940), raises more anxiety than closure about Britain’s absorption of trauma.

Figure 14.8  Final frame of Listen to Britain.

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Jennings, a classmate of William Empson, may have felt this a necessary ambiguity, a gesture to the ‘radical openness’, ‘plurality’ and ‘intersubjectivity’ of a listening ‘public sphere’ premised on acts of ‘faith in the act of listening that there will be some resonance with the address’ (Lacey 2013: 7–8). What exactly does it mean to ‘listen to Britain’, anyway? Who is listening to whom? Jennings captures the ambiguity of the acousmatic address: the possibility that no one is listening, that no one perceives the human behind the voice, and that we must continue listening still. The injunction to ‘rule’ lies in suspended tension with the injunction to ‘listen’: Jennings implicates the ‘human voice’ with human listeners, their auditory acts of ‘faith’ reciprocally inscribing a material network of musical technologies. In these films, all music is ‘music while you work’, conducted in the context of factory labour, the theatre of war and the field of cultural production.

Notes   1. Clements employs this definition of intermediality in a discussion of Gertrude Stein’s and Virgil Thomson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts, building on Rajewsky’s excavation of ‘intermediality’ as an ‘umbrella term’ for other discourses (2005: 44). See also Lewis (2020) on the visual elements of intermedial form; Lewis employs the concept of intermediality, in congress with methods of ‘new formalism’, to show how intermedial forms awaken newly mobile and ‘protean’ spatial and temporal reading practices.   2. For an exceptionally lucid explication of Pound’s Antheil treatise, see Moss: 2019. The phrase ‘audile technique’ is Sterne’s (2003).   3. Braun compares Music While You Work to noise-abatement campaigns and industrial music management in Germany, under the Nazi regime as well as in the German Democratic Republic (2012: 62–4). See also Bijsterveld’s foundational work on MWYW in relation to industrial noise (2006).   4. Inevitably, Legg’s film sidesteps debates over the material interests of working musicians and institutional tensions between national and regional programmes. See Scannell (1981: 251).  5. Upon Jennings’s untimely death, Raymond Williams’s name was offered as a potential editor of Pandaemonium. (Williams, finishing his Culture and Society: 1780–1950, was unavailable.)   6. ‘Keynote sound’ is R. Murray Schafer’s term for sounds that establish a soundscape’s basic tonality and ‘become listening habits in spite of themselves’ (1994: 9).   7. Forster praised Hess in a BBC radio talk, contrasting her liberal internationalism with the Nazis’ xenophobia (Deutsch 2016: 220); he would rehearse this claim in a screenplay for Jennings’s A Diary for Timothy (1945), which extols Beethoven’s humanism.

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Sterne, Jonathan (2003), The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thompson, Emily (2002), The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1930–1933. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Waddell, Nathan (2020), Moonlighting: Beethoven and Literary Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weidman, Amanda (2013), ‘Voice’, in Keywords in Sound, ed. Matt Sakakeeny and David Novak. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 232–45.

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15 Performance: Machine Dances and the Avant-garde’s Technological Imaginary Emilie Morin

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ot against technology, but with it!’ (Blume 2008: 51): László MoholyNagy’s motto for the Bauhaus theatre workshop during the 1920s resonates with the proliferation of ideas about mechanised performance that swept across avant-garde movements in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War. The emergence of a machine art shaped by industrial modes of production and technologies of image, sound and light is illustrated in the architectural plans for total, mechanical or spherical theatres drawn by Walter Gropius and his Bauhaus pupils; in theories of movement, such as Rudolf Laban’s eukinetics and Vsevolod Meyerhold’s biomechanics; in Constructivist acting machines and in contraptions such as Luigi Russolo’s experimental noise intoners and Moholy-Nagy’s Light-Space Modulator; and in Dadaist affirmations such as Kurt Schwitters’s ‘Rrrrummmm!!!!’ and Tristan Tzara’s ‘Boum boum boum’ (Schwitters 1993: 60; Gordon 1987: 38). To artists associated with the Dadaist, Futurist, Constructivist, De Stijl and Bauhaus movements, the machine – always a nebulous notion – offered a convenient shorthand for modernity as a whole, enabling imaginative metaphor and imitation, as well as new explorations of form and content that conveyed varying sensibilities to war and its legacies, to urbanisation and industrialisation, to theories of progress and to art’s changed purpose (see Salter 2010; Vaingurt 2013; Ovadija 2013; Broeckmann 2016). ‘The machine has become more than a mere adjunct to life. It is really part of human life – perhaps the very soul,’ Francis Picabia observed in 1915 (‘French Artists’ 1915: 2). Not everyone shared Picabia’s enthusiasm. Some wondered where the reign of the machine would take humanity. For Hugo Ball, notably, the ‘crass error’ of war was all too easy to understand: ‘We have confused men with machines. We should be decimating machines instead of people’ (qtd in Fijalkowski 1987: 235). In the wake of the First World War, and throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, performance provided a focus and a channel for modernism’s varied and discordant technological enthusiasms, and avant-garde artists who had little or no experience of the stage came to perceive the theatre, in particular, as the ideal outlet for creative energies that had nowhere else to go, as El Lissitzky observed of his painter colleagues (Drain 1995: 40). This chapter shows how performance gave form and voice to a technological imaginary that was, in principle, motivated by an aspiration to offer a synthesis between the arts but was, in practice, messy, haphazard and idiosyncratically out of step with the realities of technology. Indeed, the technological fantasies that I discuss here are neither precise nor consistent, but draw upon a whole range of vocabularies

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and techniques indebted to mechanisation and assign a new artistic purpose to industrial designs, motor sounds and geometric forms recalling factory machines and domestic appliances. There are some constants, which derive from artists’ persistent attraction to the puppet show, the circus, the ballet and the cabaret during this period. There is also great variety: some performances sought to assimilate visual and auditory references drawn from recognisable and already available technologies, while others created a new apparatus of their own; some involved banal idealisations of the machine and trite reflections on dehumanisation, while others offered probing investigations of pure movement, the rules of abstraction and the human form, and attempted to dismantle relations between cause and effect traditionally enshrined in playwriting and theatrical performance. The avant-garde’s machine art, as this chapter demonstrates, was built on grand visions of technologised performances, buildings and bodies as much as it was built on cardboard simulacra of cogs, pistons and wheels, the skills of trained and untrained dancers, trained and amateur actors, and costumes improvised from whichever materials were at hand. It was also a collaborative art, the work of painters, composers, stage designers, choreographers, writers and filmmakers, open to chance, error and discovery. Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and Rolf de Maré’s Ballets Suédois, its Swedish–Parisian counterpart, keenly encouraged these collaborations, leading Oskar Schlemmer – who kept a keen eye on their innovations – to quip that the main ambition of the Ballets Russes was to enable every famous painter living in Paris to have a go at designing a theatre set (Schlemmer 1978: 54). The artists involved had a sustained interest in mechanisation as a form of aesthetic creation; Fernand Léger, notably, theorised the beauty of the machine in essays published in 1923 and 1924 in Bulletin de l’effort moderne. In an essay dedicated to de Maré, he describes a modern world ruled by speed and movement, in which ‘the eye must know “how to choose” in the split second during which it plays out its existence, while driving the machine, on the street, or behind the scientist’s microscope’ (Léger 1924: 4; my translation). Léger’s vision of technology as a force capable of changing not simply how the world is experienced but how the eye and the mind function resonates with the ad hoc collisions of human performers, machine-like assemblages and new media shaping the stage work of the Ballets Russes, the Ballets Suédois and beyond. The libretti composed for the Ballets Russes included Georgi Yakulov’s Constructivist ode to industrial labour, Le Pas d’acier (1927), a collaboration with Léonide Massine and Kasimir Malevich in which the dancers and scenery imitated machine parts, and Jean Cocteau’s Parade (1917), with music by Erik Satie, choreography by Massine and décor and costumes by Picasso, with a contribution from the Futurist Fortunato Depero (Pizzi 2019: 98). Satie’s score for Parade was initially driven by Cocteau’s wish (which was partially frustrated) to have ‘dynamos – Morse code machine – sirens – express train – airplane’ feature as ‘trompe l’oreille’ or auditory illusions in a manner emulating Georges Braque’s integration of mundane objects into his collages (Cocteau 1948: 58). The Ballets Suédois honed a whole repertoire of skits, including Cocteau’s libretto Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel (1921), with music by Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger and the rest of the Six; the set resembled the Eiffel Tower photographed from above and the dialogue involved two actors dressed as speaking phonographs, commenting upon the miscellany of machines before them, including a bicycle, a camera and an imaginary train. Other pieces performed by the Ballets Suédois included Paul Claudel’s ‘plastic poem’, L’Homme

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et son désir (1921), with music by Milhaud; the ‘symphonie choréographique’ or ‘dance-poem’ Skating Rink (1922) by Ricciotto Canudo, Léger and Honegger; Blaise Cendrars’s ballet La Création du monde (1923), a collaboration with Léger and Milhaud; Pirandello’s libretto La Jarre (1924), with costumes by Giorgio de Chirico; and Relâche (1924), Picabia’s ‘instantaneist ballet’, with music by Satie. Both Honegger and Milhaud composed scores foregrounding machines: Honegger’s Pacific 231 (1923) was a musical recreation of a moving locomotive, while Milhaud’s Machines agricoles (1919) set to music descriptions of farming machinery collected from farming exhibitions catalogues (Milhaud 1998: 105). Relâche, meanwhile, partially emerged from ideas put forward by Satie and André Derain to perform ‘a parody of the Cinema’ in which the characters ‘would have the appearance of emerging from the screen’ (McCarren 2003: 118); the collaboration inspired from this idea and led by Picabia featured a film by René Clair, Entr’acte (1924), animated by flashing electric signs and powerful stage lights (Gordon 1987: 163). These pieces illustrate the many forms that the new machine art took on the stages of Europe, from pieces that drew on mime, puppetry and idealised automata to performances that revolved around costume and stage designs aligned with innovations in painting and sculpture, through to collaborative skits featuring film projections and dance performances, and abstract pieces involving mobile figures and the play of colour and light. Throughout the 1920s, the label ‘mechanical’ proved seductive, and was deployed to qualify experiments with dance choreographies and animated figures long before Fernand Léger, Dudley Murphy and Georges Antheil made their ‘film without scenario’, Ballet mécanique (1924). Machine pieces included Vilmos Huszár’s Mechanical Dancing Figure (completed in 1920); Ivo Pannaggi and Vinicio Paladini’s Futurist Mechanical Dance (1922), which was performed to the noise of two motorcycles (Poggi 2009: 326); Machine Dances (1922 and 1923) by Bronislava Nijinska, sister of Nijinski; and Nikolai Foregger’s Dance of the Machines (1923). Mechanical fantasies also dominated the experimental performances devised at the Bauhaus, where a considerable proportion of the staff developed a strong interest in theatre and mechanical performances, particularly between 1923 and 1926, despite inadequate facilities (Michaud 1978: 68, 151–2, 162, 168). Kurt Schmidt and Georg Teltscher’s Mechanical Ballet was the centrepiece in a Bauhaus event baptised The Mechanical Cabaret (1923); Schmidt planned ballets called Man+Machine and Man–Machine (1924); Moholy-Nagy published a Sketch for a Score for a Mechanised Eccentric (1925), which envisioned a kinetic performance of moving panels, machines and light in which no body appeared (see Michaud 1978: 162); Joost Schmidt and Heinz Loew designed different models for a ‘Mechanical Stage’ (1926 and 1927); and Andor Weiniger crafted plans for a ‘Spherical Theatre’ (1926), conceived as ‘the home of the mechanical play’ and offering ‘a new mechanical synthesis’ of space, body, line, point, light, sound and noise (Gropius 1961: 89). The relationship between machine and inventor provided fodder for other performances – notably, The Man at the Control Panel (1924), a pantomime about a man possessed by electricity, with a set and costumes designed by Schmidt to suggest coils, tension and speed (Schawinsky 1971: 32). Schlemmer’s The Figural Cabinet (1922), a fantasy about machine and inventor inspired by E. T. A. Hoffmann, featured a stage shaped like a shooting gallery and multicoloured figures marching by, their bodies and interchangeable heads stuck on rolling panels moving in opposite directions (Michaud 1978: 82–3). The surviving script shows that only

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Hoffmann’s Spalanzani, the inventor, was impersonated, ‘spooking around, directing, gesticulating, telephoning, shooting himself in the head, and dying a thousand deaths from worry about the function of the functional’ (Gropius 1961: 40). These performances called for new conceptions of staging: the stage – often approached as a space that followed its own rules and logic, dictated not by convention but by the vision of the artist – became a receptacle for visionary scripts that did not necessarily need to remain within the order of the feasible, but could reach for the unachievable and illustrate pure aesthetic aspirations. That some of these pieces hankered for formal abstraction does not mean that their content was also abstract or attempted to question social norms, however; as in the many robot-inspired texts discussed by Katherine Shingler in this volume, the worship of technology did not go hand in hand with a neutral or, indeed, progressive social vision. In The Figural Cabinet, for example, the heads moving like shooting targets include that of a woman called Gret, who has ‘a blabbermouth and a swivelhead / and a nose like a trumpet’, and a figure called ‘the Turk’ (Gropius 1961: 40). Other scripts were mostly a glorification of masculinity, with women featuring as men’s prey. The script of Relâche, notably, calls for a woman wearing a ‘very elegant evening dress’, who ‘disrobes down to pink silk tights, skin tight’ while ‘thirty men in black suits, white ties, white gloves and opera hats’ circle around her (the second half of the performance suggests an attempt to reverse the gaze, albeit in an unimaginative and formulaic way: the woman, still in pink tights, watches the men disrobe) (Gordon 1987: 162); the weakness of the plot contrasts with the spectacular set imagined by Picabia. In a similar mode, Ivo Pannaggi and Vinicio Paladini’s Futurist Mechanical Dance presented the dilemma of a man – a ‘proletarian Man-Machine’ – torn between his attraction for a machine and for a nightclub dancer (Berghaus 1998: 425–6; Pizzi 2019: 144–7), while Xanti Schawinsky’s Bauhaus pantomime, Feminine Repetition, involved two men, one wearing beach attire and the other dressed as a tap dancer, courting the same woman (Michaud 1978: 166). For some artists, finding suitable content with which to experiment remained a perennial problem: in 1930, in the wake of performances of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, for which he had devised scenery in the industrial style of the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy observed: ‘Grand opera and Total Theater don’t blend. One can’t dress obsolete content with modern design. One could, but the guardians of tradition won’t let us’ (Moholy-Nagy 1950: 50). The focus on machine-like performance made new types of notation a necessity; Schlemmer, in particular, became acutely aware of the difficulties inherent in scripting kinetic performances. Reflecting on the score for his Dance of Gestures (1926), he remarked upon ‘the difficulty of the problem of preparing a script for dance and other stage action’: a diagram can indicate tempo and sound, but cannot give ‘precise indications of gesture (movements of torso, legs, arms, and hands), of mimetics (motions of the head, facial expression), of voice pitch, and so on’ (Gropius 1961: 86). ‘The more completely such a script tries to fix the total action,’ he concluded, ‘the more the multitude of essential details complicates the matter and obscures the very purpose of such a score, namely, legibility’ (Gropius 1961: 86). Performance was not necessarily the ultimate goal; in some radical experiments on abstraction and notation – such as Moholy-Nagy’s Sketch for a Score for a Mechanised Eccentric and Wassily Kandinsky’s Yellow Sound and other ‘colour-tone’ dramas – the idea that the script should facilitate a performance is secondary, and

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the script is entirely driven by its attempt to imagine a choreography of sound, light and movement. Such pieces were not staged during their authors’ lifetimes, like other scripts hankering after technologies yet to be born, the most noteworthy of which include Schwitters’s choral theatre piece, Above and Below (1925–9), in which voices attempt to mimic the sounds of industrial production, only to reveal their inability to do so (‘Howl howl/ Screech screech / Blast blast / Turn turn’; Schwitters 1993: 195), and the plays that Mina Loy wrote during her Futurist phase. The opening of Loy’s Two Plays (1915) features a man pressing an ‘electric button’, triggering off ‘shattering insistant noise’ and pandemonium: ‘intermittently arc-light extinguishes – varicolored shafts of lightning crash through fifty-nine windows at irregular heights – the floor worked by propellers – rises and falls irrhythmically – the disymetric receding and incursive planes and angles of walls and ceiling interchange kaleidescopically to successive intricacies’ [sic] (Loy 1996: 8). In these attempts to imagine and craft a radically new kind of performance some familiar ideas reverberate: that theatre, as a medium overly laden with conventions of acting and writing, had become its own worst enemy, and that the social foibles and delusions upon which it relied had become obvious with the advent of cinema. Responding to claims that cinema was in the process of superseding theatre, Antonio Gramsci argued, in 1916, that cinema and theatre offered the same kind of entertainment, but cinema did so ‘under better conditions, without the choreographic contrivances of a false intellectualism, without promising too much while delivering little’ (Gramsci 1985: 55). For Gramsci, cinema had an honesty and a transparency that theatre did not have: ‘It is silent; in other words it reduces the role of the artists to movement alone, to being machines without souls, to what they really are in the theatre as well’ (Gramsci 1985: 55). The ‘cult of the puppet’ (to borrow Olga Taxidou’s phrase; Taxidou 2007: 16), influenced by Edward Gordon Craig’s views on the unreliability of the human form and Heinrich von Kleist’s reflections on the marionette’s unique grace, also looms large in many of the experimental performances and scripts glorifying the machine aesthetic (see Koss 2003). The idea of transforming the actor into a partially mechanised being is an avant-garde commonplace: giant puppets, papier mâché heads, cardboard contraptions and costumes transforming actors and dancers into the semblance of marionettes recur in performances from the period. At the Bauhaus, which saw an efflorescence of puppet-making and marionette theatre between 1920 and 1923, the reflection on performance was led by Schlemmer, who was fascinated by Kleist’s and Craig’s writings on the marionette. Schlemmer – for whom the marionette remained a theoretical interest, rather than part of his practice – cited them frequently in essays on theatre and dance, and enjoyed recalling how the Russian Symbolist Valery Briusov had once wished for a theatre that could ‘replace actors with mechanised dolls, into each of which a phonograph shall be built’ (Schlemmer 1978: 66; Gropius 1961: 28). To others too, semi-automated beings could provide the solution to performance challenges: Lissitzky, for example, felt that the difficulties posed by the Russian CuboFuturist opera Victory Over the Sun (which called for ‘[a] traveller through the centuries arriv[ing] in the wheels of an airplane’ and ‘[a] machine gun of the future country appear[ing] on stage and stop[ping] at a telephone pole’; Kruchenykh 1971: 110, 112) could be resolved with puppets. He modelled a performance based on the play, an ‘electromechanical peepshow’, in which ‘[a]ll the parts of the stage and all the

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bodies are set in motion by means of electromechanical forces and devices’ (LissitzkyKüppers 1968: 352). As part of the set and costumes designed by Kasimir Malevich in 1915, the actors wore Cubist costumes made of cardboard and large papier mâché heads, and performed the piece on a narrow strip of stage, with puppet-like gestures (Goldberg 1979: 24). Likewise, Jean Cocteau’s Le Bœuf sur le toit relies upon the idea that the cast are ‘props that move’; the script indicates that they should all wear ‘cardboard heads, three times the normal size’ and move ‘in slow-motion, heavily like divers, and in opposition to the music’ (Cocteau 1972: 34). Ultimately, the origins of the new machine art are uncertain. Some of its underlying concerns can be traced back to the three-dimensional architectural objects that Vladimir Tatlin started making in 1914, using basic industrial materials such as metal, wood and iron; these works proved important for Dada, as well as Futurism (Broeckmann 2016: 9–11; Salter 2010: 13). In any case, the birth of a theatre free from all the old trappings of plot, scenery and acting had long been wished for; we can trace such aspirations back to Alfred Jarry, who, in 1896, provocatively listed scenery and actors at the top of ‘an index of certain things that are notoriously horrid [. . .] and that encumber the stage uselessly’ (Drain 1995: 11). These dreams of simplicity find concrete form in some Bauhaus realisations – in the improvisation Meta or the Pantomime of Places (1924), which presented ‘a simple plot [. . .] freed from all accessories and paraphernalia’ and signalled the progression of the action ‘by means of placards’ (Gropius 1961: 44); or in Loew’s model for a ‘Mechanical Stage’, which sought to dispense with human input and presented rotary discs and movable objects that could be controlled mechanically, ‘undisguised and as an end in itself’ (Gropius 1961: 84). These plans for mechanised performances were also exercises in synthesis, not simply between technologies and visions of the machine, but also between artistic forms, media and the senses. Moholy-Nagy labelled his Sketch for a Score for a Mechanised Eccentric as a ‘synthesis of form, movement, sound, light (color) and smell’ (Gropius 1925: n.p.). Huszár’s Mechanical Dancing Figure was the centrepiece in a mechanical stage performance that he called ‘Plastic Drama’, which he wanted to be performed ‘with electro-mechanical or coloristic-cinematographic’ means; if this proved impossible, he indicated that marionettes could be considered in order to realise the piece in its most ‘primitive’ form (Huszár 1921: 126; Troy 1984: 649). Indeed, during the Dada tour of the Netherlands in 1923, the piece was realised using a marionette projected as a shadow on a screen (White 2003: 39). The Italian Futurists, who hailed the ‘reign of the Machine’ and its corollary, ‘multiplied Man’, with unconditional enthusiasm from early on (Rainey et al. 2009: 89–92), created performances that integrated real machines and paid tribute to motor noises, the motorised body and the piston engine (see Berghaus 1998; Pizzi 2019) while attempting to transcend the machine’s earth-bound parameters and transforming it into a cipher for any worthwhile artistic pursuit. The idea that artistic creation should proceed in symbiosis with the machine is central to several manifestos, including F. T. Marinetti’s ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ (1909) and Enrico Prampolini’s call for ‘mechanical introspection’ (Prampolini 1922); it also shapes Futurist conceptions of a technologised theatre – notably, Prampolini’s model for a ‘Magnetic Theatre’, which involved kinetic elements and a chromatic light show (Berghaus 1998: 445–6), and Depero’s Anihccam del 3000 (Anihccam being an anagram of macchina), a ballet in which two dancing locomotives express their love for a

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stationmaster (Pizzi 2019: 101). The ‘Manifesto of Futurist Mechanical Art’ (1922) by Pannaggi and Paladini – who also celebrated the machine in their paintings – argued for a complete symbiosis of feeling with the machine, claiming an irresistible attraction to ‘[p]ulleys and flywheels, bolts and smokestacks, all the polished steel and odor of grease’: ‘We feel mechanically, and we sense that we ourselves are also made of steel, we too are machines, we too have been mechanised by our surroundings’ (Rainey et al. 2009: 272). Marinetti often resorted to analogies with the piston engine and the moving wheel when defining the movements to be used by Futurist performers and dancers; his manifesto defining ‘Dynamic and Synoptic Declamation’ (1916) advised the Futurist declaimer to ‘Gesticulate geometrically, so giving his arms the sharp rigidity of semaphore signals and lighthouse rays in order to indicate the direction of forces, or of pistons and wheels, to express the dynamism of words-in-freedom’ (Rainey et al. 2009: 272). His ‘Manifesto of Futurist Dance’ (1917), accompanied by scripts for dances glorifying war – ‘The Shrapnel Dance’, ‘The Machine-Gun Dance’ and the ‘Dance of the Aviatrix’ – argued for a Futurist dance practice able to ‘imitate the movements of machines assiduously paying court to steering wheels, tires, pistons, and so preparing for the fusion of man with the machine’ (Rainey et al. 2009: 235). His vision had already been realised: in 1914, Giacomo Balla gave a private performance for Diaghilev of Printing Press (Macchina tipografica), a dance based on the workings of a newspaper typesetting machine which involved six performers simulating a piston and another six simulating a wheel driven by the piston; all were arranged in a geometrical pattern, and each uttered specific onomatopoeias keyed to their movements (Goldberg 1979: 16; Poggi 2009: 120). The fascination that Balla and Marinetti expressed for the interplay between pistonoperated engines and wheels resonates in later mechanical dances that also foreground tempo. Massine’s choreography for Le Pas d’acier, notably, ended with a scene in which ‘the wheels and pistons on the rostrums moved in time to the hammering movements of the young factory workers’ (Massine 1968: 172), transforming the dancers into ‘a kinetic, mechanised, interdependent mass to express the movement of cogs, levers, transmissions, wheels and pistons’ (Norton 2004: 113). Likewise, the dancers in Nijinska’s Machine Dances simulated different machine parts and were trained to perform a machine-like ‘dynamic rhythm’ that could accommodate ‘unexpected nervous breaking’ (Salter 2010: 233). One part of Foregger’s Dance of the Machines imitated an engine transmission; another, a mechanical saw (Goldberg 1979: 28); Foregger wanted his audience to grasp ‘the rhythm that is so essential in all labour processes’ (Braun 2012: 90). He praised ‘the precision and accuracy of machines’ when describing the rhythm of the piece and perceived ‘the dancer’s body as a machine and the volitional muscles as the machinist’ (Foregger 1975: 77, 75). A contemporary, René Fülöp-Miller, described Dance of the Machines as ‘a cinematics of the living organism, an analysis in dance of the human mechanism’, concluding: ‘Dancing is intended to be nothing but a vivid demonstration of the adequate organization of the human machine’ (Fülöp-Miller 1927: 182). Other dance creations focused on rhythm without requiring a sophisticated physical performance: Schmidt and Teltscher’s Mechanical Ballet – which involved five actors dancing against a black backdrop, rhythmically, to a uniform and monotone music, and wearing black leotards, black tights and geometric cardboard costumes (Michaud 1978: 85) – sought to express ‘the technical spirit’ of the period through a ‘uniform, constant rhythm [. . .] with no changes of tempo’,

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as Schmidt later explained (Droste 1990: 102). A world separates the makeshift and minimalist arrangements of Bauhaus performances from the well-oiled choreographies of Russian Constructivism, which strive for a total vision and total method; yet within these performances we can discern a shared fascination for the suggestive power of the machine as artistic idea, dissociated from the mundane realities of technology and its production imperatives, and reduced to a repetitive tempo and movements that have no aim beyond the performance itself. Avant-garde visions of mechanised performance did not develop in isolation but as part of a transnational dialogue, conducted across languages and cultural borders, and through the little magazines and other publications in which performances were sometimes described (see White 2003: 39). The note in De Stijl in which Huszár described the ‘Plastic Drama’ hosting his Mechanical Dancing Figure, for example, proved particularly important for Schmidt, and helped him shape his own Mechanical Ballet at the Bauhaus (Michaud 1978: 96). Festivals and exhibitions – notably, Friedrich Kiesler’s International Exhibition of New Theatre Techniques (1924) – also played a key role in disseminating ideas. Kiesler’s exhibition, a veritable who’s who of the interwar avantgarde, brought to Vienna avant-garde artists from the Bauhaus, Futurism, Dada, De Stijl and Constructivism, exposing them to a wide range of theories and work on theatre and dance in which technology and mechanics featured strongly. Léger’s Ballet mécanique was first shown on this occasion; Schawinsky also recalled performing his piece The Circus (1924), a pantomime featuring the Bauhaus theatre group dressed as puppet-like animals and circus performers, and remembered hearing Léger and witnessing his ballet La Création du monde (Schawinsky 1971: 33). Alongside these events, Kiesler – then renowned for the striking set he had designed for Karel Čapek’s robot play R.U.R. in 1922 – curated a large exhibition of theatre paraphernalia from across Europe, including models of theatre sets, designs and costumes. The exhibition catalogue, framed by commentaries on theatre and dance, shows that designs, models and sketches by ninety-five contemporary artists from across Europe were exhibited, including materials from mechanical performances conceived by Schlemmer, Moholy-Nagy, Schmidt, Depero, Pannaggi and Paladini, as well as pieces created for the Ballets Suédois by Léger and for Cocteau (Kiesler 1975). The Austrian–Hungarian journal MA reproduced some of these exhibits that same year, in a richly illustrated issue featuring essays by Marinetti, Schwitters, Lissitzky, Grosz, Picasso, Prampolini, Moholy-Nagy and others, commenting on the theatre of the future and the potential of the mechanical (Kassák 1924). Here, the avant-garde’s machine art is framed as a coherent artistic endeavour across the Continent: photographs from Meyerhold’s stage machinery accompany an essay by Marinetti; Schwitters’s description of Merz theatre features alongside remnants of El Lissitzky’s ‘electromechanical show’; Léger’s designs for Cendrars’s La Création du monde are shown alongside a theatre composition by Hans Suschny; and an image from Picasso’s costumes for Parade appears alongside a figure from Schmidt and Teltscher’s Mechanical Ballet and an essay by Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt on the mechanisation of music. For the artists associated with the Bauhaus, who worked in a world shaped by patents and collaborations with industry, there was nothing to fear about technology or about modes of industrial production; rather, technology could enable the conception of art forms better suited to life and to the needs of humankind. ‘Even a complete mechanization of art might not, it seems to me, imply a menace to its essential

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creativeness,’ Moholy-Nagy observed in a 1936 essay describing mechanised representation and reproduction as the nexus of new interrelations within the visual arts of the present, past and future: ‘Painting, photography, film and light display no longer have any exclusive sphere of activity jealously isolated from one another. They are all weapons in the struggle for a new and more purposive human reality’ (Kostelanetz 1970: 43). An extensive corpus of theoretical texts on performance and technology reveals the dedication with which Moholy-Nagy and others looked towards technology to move away from figuration. In their view, the task of the artist was to give a clear direction to the proliferation of possibilities opened up by the new technological reality, and to create new artistic forms that bridged the multiple worlds of photography, film, architecture, design, typography, theatre and dance. Schlemmer, who had first trained as a painter like Moholy-Nagy, saw mechanisation and abstraction as the twin poles of modernity; he argued that within technology and invention lay the promise of a new future for art in general and for theatre in particular, and sought to integrate the human figure into ‘the geometry of calisthenics, eurhythmics, and gymnastics’, to produce movements ‘determined mechanically and rationally’ (Gropius 1961: 17, 23). Kandinsky pointed to ‘the collapse of the wall dividing art from technology’ and imagined the rules of abstraction through a variety of media including photography, stage design and dance, extracting point-line compositions from diverse photographs including electric pylons and Gret Palucca dancing (Kandinsky 1994: 714, 520–3, 624–5). These reflections on a new mechanised art often served to affirm an undefeated humanism: Moholy-Nagy asserted that he placed his faith not in art but in humankind (Kostelanetz 1970: 18), while Schlemmer emphasised that he did ‘not want to produce what industrial manufacture already does better, what engineers do better’, but wanted to focus on ‘the metaphysical element: art itself’ (Harrison and Wood 2003: 307). In this context, the sound and letter poems of the Expressionist, Futurist and Dadaist poets held particular significance: for Moholy-Nagy, these works finally put ‘an end to the rule of logical-intellectual evaluation’ in a way that could be applied to the theatre and enabled the artist to dispense with the traditional representational logics assuming that theatre and performance should present a relation between cause and effect (Passuth 1987: 299). In his landmark essay ‘Theatre, Circus, Variety’, he claimed affinities with Schwitters’s Merz, Dada and Italian Futurism, which had succeeded in showing that ‘phonetic word relationships were more significant than other creative literary means’ (Gropius 1961: 52). Dadaist and Futurist synthetic performance strategies were of particular interest to him, as well as the effect produced by ‘the repetition of a thought in the same words, in the same or a varying inflection, by several performers at the same time’ (Passuth 1987: 300). He imagined a new kind of dramatic performance emulating sound poetry, but in another form, and observed that ‘similar effects can be obtained from the simultaneous, synoptical, and synacoustical reproduction of thought (with motion pictures, photographs, loud-speakers), or from the reproduction of thoughts suggested by the construction of variously meshing gears’ (Gropius 1961: 62). When it came to the stage itself, his imagination was boundless, and he pondered various types of machinery that went much further than Meyerhold’s constructivist stage. Nothing was off limits: ‘film, automobile, elevator, airplane, and other machinery, as well as optical instruments, reflecting equipment, and so on’; ‘suspended bridges and drawbridges running horizontally, diagonally, and

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vertically within the space of the theater; platform stages built far into the auditorium’; ‘rotating sections’ and ‘movable space constructions and DISLIKE AREAS, in order to bring certain action moments on the stage into prominence, as in film “close-ups”’ (Gropius 1961: 67, 68). These ideas remained mostly unrealised, but energised experiments with performance at the Bauhaus as well as his own work and his film scripts. These mechanical visions and experiments with play-acting, dance, scenery and costumes contributed to shaping the performing arts as we know them today, and yet we know little about what some of these performances looked and felt like to their early audiences. The 1932 recording of Schwitters reading the Ursonate for the Süddeutscher Rundfunk is the only record of live performance to have survived from the interwar period, and it gives a sense of the great challenges posed by the avant-garde fascination with mechanisation: the alphabet becomes a synthesis of noises mimicking the train, the factory and the mechanics of mass production in a more abstract sense. A few landmark performances have been recreated: Günter Berghaus reconstructed some Futurist mechanical performances in 1995 and 1996 (Berghaus 2011: 82), and in 1987 and 1988 the music theatre company Theater der Klänge created a performance around Moholy-Nagy’s Sketch for a Score for a Mechanised Eccentric and reworked The Mechanical Ballet, granting a more contemporary form to it. Footage of the latter production (see Mertens 2008) shows how closely the geometrical figures conceived by Schmidt resemble piston engine parts, once animated, and how far removed they seem from the purely abstract forms appearing on historic photographs. Overall, nonetheless, this strand of experimental work has left few traces, consisting mainly of black-and-white photographs, sketches, costumes and first-hand recollections expressing bewilderment and admiration. It can be difficult to square these records – the photographs in particular, which can alternate between marvellously eerie visions and something resembling a fancy-dress party gone awry (see Figure 15.1) – with the revolutionary character of the live event as described in contemporaneous sources. Recollections from audience members and friends are not necessarily reliable: avant-garde performance has proved particularly prone to selective recollection and conflicting memories, as Thomas Postlewait has shown in relation to the iconic premiere of Jarry’s Ubu Roi (Postlewait 2009). Yet, on occasion, marginal evidence shows how deeply affecting these spectacles could be. Hans Richter described Schwitters’s performance of his Ursonate in Potsdam in 1924 or 1925 as a moment of great joy and wonder: at first, Schwitters’s audience, ‘who had no experience whatever of anything modern’, was ‘completely baffled’; then the spectators ‘lost control’ and ‘shrieked with laughter, gasped for breath, slapped their thighs, choked themselves’, and eventually ‘came to Schwitters, again with tears in their eyes, almost stuttering with admiration and gratitude. Something had been opened up within them, something they had never expected to feel: a great joy’ (Schwitters 1993: xxi). Similarly, T. Lux Feininger wrote of his ‘breathless excitement, admiration, and wonder’ upon witnessing a performance of Schlemmer’s Dance of Gestures and Dance of Forms (Feininger 1960: 272). ‘The stage elements were assembled, re-grouped, amplified, and gradually grew into something like a “play,”’ he recalled many years later (Feininger 1960: 273). In spite of the grand ambitions that framed it, avant-garde machine aesthetics remained shaped by a visible lack of means: the machine art that the Dadaists greeted in 1920 (‘Long live the machine art of Vladimir Tatlin’) was also an art of poor materials and leftovers (Broeckmann 2016: 9–11). At the Bauhaus, costume-making mostly

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Figure 15.1  Copy print: Members of the Bauhaus Stage Workshop on the Roof of the Studio Building, 1927 (printed ca. 1948), Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Herbert Bayer, © President and Fellows of Harvard College, © T. Lux Feininger, © Estate of T. Lux Feininger, BR48.121. involved cardboard cut-outs and ‘papier-mâché work over plaster sculptural forms’, as Schawinsky recalled (Schawinsky 1971: 32); as for the theatre workshop, it began with little more than a bare platform (Schlemmer 1978: 46). The costumes that have been photographed – particularly the kapok-filled costumes made for Schlemmer’s dances – have a handmade feel and look as though each stitch would be visible when seen up close. Today, these iconic performances would come across as ‘more or less serious experiments in kinetic art’, as Torsten Blume observes (Blume 2008: 25). No one had trained formally in acting or dance, but there was interest aplenty. As Feininger diplomatically put it, ‘the Bauhaus stage did not train pupils in ballet or choreography, but it attracted persons who had ideas and interest in this field and gave them an opportunity to lend their talent to the work’ (Feininger 1960: 273). Those who were involved in the stage workshop did so as part of their extra-curricular activities, and the syllabus did not offer formal training in theatre and costume design, nor indeed in acting, dance and music (Blume 2008: 23). This lack of training and paucity of means provided the ideal circumstances for experiment. Here is how Stuckenschmidt described the moment when the Mechanical Ballet came into being: [Schmidt’s studio] was full of man-high constructions of cardboard, wire, canvas and wood, all in elementary forms: circles, triangles, squares, rectangles, trapezia, and naturally all in the primary colours yellow, red and blue. Schmidt put on a red square,

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fastening it with leather straps in such a way that he disappeared behind it. Two of his colleagues did the same with a circle and a triangle. These strange geometric figures, their wearers completely invisible behind them, then danced an eerie round. There was an old piano against the wall. It refused to stay in tune and sounded appalling. I improvised a few chords and aggressive rhythms. The cardboard figures immediately began to react. An abstract dance of square, circle and triangle was performed ad lib. After about a quarter of an hour, Kurt Schmidt got out of his square, rather out of breath but thoroughly satisfied. I had instinctively guessed and performed something he had wanted but only vaguely imagined: a primitive accompaniment roughly corresponding to the primary geometric forms . . . From now on we rehearsed every day, from morning till night . . . After two or three weeks the programme of ‘The Mechanical Ballet,’ or rather ‘The Mechanical Cabaret,’ of which it was a part, had been created. (Droste 1990: 102–3) These visions of the makeshift work taking place behind the scenes seem difficult to reconcile with the reverence and enthusiasm with which the Bauhaus and other avantgarde movements greeted the idea of automatised and technologised performance, and with their aspirations for efficient and streamlined machines. To the modernist avantgarde, technology was more of a dream than a reality; yet in the many gaps between their visions of mechanical forms and the poor materials of theatre and dance, artists found the freedom to imagine new forms of performance.

Works Cited Berghaus, Günter (1998), Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909–1944. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Berghaus, Günter (2011), ‘From Avant-Garde to Mainstream: Futurist Theatre in the 1920s’, in Historische avant garde en het theater in het Interbellum, ed. Peter Benoy and Jaak van Schoor. Brussels: ASP, pp. 75–93. Blume, Torsten (2008), ‘The Historic Bauhaus Stage – A Theatre of Space’, in Bauhaus. Bühne. Dessau/Bauhaus. Theatre. Dessau, ed. Torsten Blume and Burghard Duhm. Berlin: Jovis, pp. 22–64. Braun, Edward (2012), ‘Futurism in the Russian Theatre, 1913–1923’, in International Futurism in Arts and Literature, ed. Günter Berghaus. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 75–99. Broeckmann, Andreas (2016), Machine Art in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cocteau, Jean (1948), Le Rappel à l’ordre. Paris: Stock. Cocteau, Jean (1972), Le Bœuf sur le toit or The Nothing-Doing Bar, trans. N. E. Nes, in The Puppet Issue, TDR: The Drama Review, ed. Michael Kirby, 16: 3, pp. 33–5. Drain, Richard, ed. (1995), Twentieth Century Theatre: A Sourcebook. Abingdon: Routledge. Droste, Magdalena (1990), Bauhaus, 1919–1933, trans. Karen Williams. Berlin: Taschen. Feininger, T. L. (1960), ‘The Bauhaus: Evolution of an Idea’, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, 2: 3, pp. 260–77. Fijalkowski, Krzysztof (1987), ‘Dada and the Machine’, Journal of European Studies, 17: 4, pp. 233–51. Foregger, Nikolai (1975), ‘Experiments in the Art of the Dance’, trans. David Miller, TDR: The Drama Review, 19: 1, pp. 74–7. ‘French Artists Spur On an American Art’ (1915), New York Tribune, 24 October, p. 2. Fülöp-Miller, René (1927), The Mind and Face of Bolshevism: An Examination of Cultural Life in Soviet Russia, trans. F. S. Flint and D. F. Tait. London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

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Goldberg, Roselee (1979), Performance: Live Art, 1909 to the Present. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Gordon, Mel, ed. (1987), Dada Performance. New York: PAJ Publications. Gramsci, Antonio (1985), Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. D. Forgacs and G. NowellSmith, trans. W. Boelhower. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gropius, Walter, ed. (1925), Die Bühne im Bauhaus: Bauhausbuch Nr. 4. Munich: Albert Langen. Gropius, Walter, ed. (1961), The Theatre of the Bauhaus, trans. A. S. Wensinger. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University. Harrison, Charles and Paul Wood, eds (2003), Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, 2nd edn, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Huszár, Vilmos (1921), ‘Kurze technische Erklärung von der “Gestaldende Schauspiel”, Komposition 1920–21’, De Stijl, 4: 8, pp. 126–8. Kandinsky, Wassily (1994), Complete Writings on Art, ed. K. C. Lindsay and P. Vergo. New York: Da Capo Press. Kassák, Lajos, ed. (1924), Musik und Theater Nummer/Musique et théâtre/Külön Szám, MA, 2: 8–9, n.p. Kiesler, Freidrich, ed. (1975 [1924]), Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik. Vienna: Löcker & Wögenstein. Koss, Juliet (2003), ‘Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls’, The Art Bulletin, 85: 4, pp. 724–45. Kostelanetz, Richard, ed. (1970), Moholy-Nagy: An Anthology. New York: Da Capo Press. Kruchenykh, Alexei (1971), ‘Victory over the Sun Prologue’, trans. E. Bartos and V. Nes Kirby, TDR: The Drama Review, 15: 4, pp. 107–25. Léger, Fernand (1924), ‘Le Spectacle’, Bulletin de l’effort moderne, 7, pp. 4–7. Lissitzky-Küppers, Sophie, ed. (1968), El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts. London: Thames and Hudson. Loy, Mina (1996), Two Plays, Performing Arts Journal, 18: 1, pp. 8–17. McCarren, Felicia (2003), Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Massine, Leonide (1968), My Life in Ballet, ed. P. Hartnoll and R. Rubens. London: Macmillan. Mertens, H. (2008), Ausschnitte aus ausgewählten Aufführungen auf der Bauhausbühne/ Excerpts from Selected Performances of the Bauhaus Stage, DVD, in Bauhaus. Bühne. Dessau/Bauhaus. Theatre. Dessau, ed. T. Blume and B. Duhm. Berlin: Jovis. Michaud, Eric (1978), Théâtre au Bauhaus (1919–1929). Lausanne: La Cité-L’Age d’Homme. Milhaud, Darius (1998), Ma vie heureuse. Bourg-la-Reine: Zurfluh. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl (1950), Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality. New York: Harper and Brothers. Norton, Leslie (2004), Léonide Massine and the 20th-Century Ballet. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Ovadija, Mladen (2013), Dramaturgy of Sound in the Avant-Garde and Postdramatic Theatre. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Passuth, Krisztina (1987), Moholy-Nagy. London: Thames and Hudson. Pizzi, K. (2019), Italian Futurism and the Machine. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Poggi, Christine (2009), Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Postlewait, Thomas, ed. (2009), ‘Cultural Histories: The Case of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi’, in The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 60–86. Prampolini, Enrico (1922), ‘The Aesthetic of the Machine and Mechanical Introspection in Art’, Broom, 3: 3, pp. 235–7. Rainey, Lawrence, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman, eds (2009), Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Salter, Chris (2010), Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schawinsky, Xanti (1971), ‘From the Bauhaus to Black Mountain’, TDR: The Drama Review, 15: 3, pp. 30–44. Schlemmer, Oskar (1978), Théâtre et abstraction (L’Espace du Bauhaus), ed. and trans. E. Michaud. Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme. Schwitters, Kurt (1993), Pppppp: Poems Performance Pieces Proses Plays Poetics, ed. J. Rothenberg and P. Joris. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Taxidou, Olga (2007), Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Troy, N. J. (1984), ‘Figures of the Dance in De Stijl’, The Art Bulletin, 66: 4, pp. 645–56. Vaingurt, Julia (2013), Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and the Arts in Russia of the 1920s. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. White, Michael (2003), De Stijl and Dutch Modernism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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16 Amplification: At Home with Marlene Dietrich Overseas Damien Keane

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rop the needle on the record and the voice of the chanteuse fills the living room: Sei lieb zu mir / komm nicht / wie ein dieb zu mir / sag nicht immer Sie zu mir / wenn andere dabei sind. Mixed in front of the swelling strings, the tinkling piano, a fitfully ardent accordion, her voice is close to listeners, the studio microphone having rendered its sighs and hesitations and quavering holds with full presence, but without reverberation. For listeners sitting at home, these production techniques are meant to evoke the nostalgic and melancholy intimacies associated with the small café or cabaret. It is a quiet record that amplification has made possible. The arrival of high-fidelity, long-playing microgroove vinyl records on the commercial market in 1948 ushered in what Roland Gelatt called the ‘renaissance at a new speed’, or what has since come to be known as the LP era (Gelatt 1955: 290–304). Although long-playing discs made from a variety of materials and spinning at various speeds had been employed in the broadcasting industry for close to two decades, the war had accelerated research into plastics, which had resulted in both a durable base for magnetic tape and the vinylite products used in the production of long-playing records. It was Columbia who first brought out the 33-rpm vinyl record and called the new format the ‘LP’, in so doing promising the listening public a revolution in how music could be played back and stored at home. For listeners, the plastic base produced noticeably less surface noise and a greater dynamic range, while the slower rate of rotation and narrower grooves allowed for more music and better continuity (Schicke 1974: 114–30). Record labels initially marketed ‘high fidelity’ recordings as the realisation of a sonic documentary ideal, as the capability to bring the concert hall or night club faithfully into any domestic space. Yet the new format’s finer sonic definition also offered a challenge to this aspiration toward mimetic auditory realism, precisely through the enhanced ability to arrange and manipulate sounds within the field of the recording. Rather than ‘duplicat[e] the sound of an original performance’, engineers and producers might instead construct ‘a soundscape specifically for the home listener’ (Barry 2010: 120). While exceeding purely technological considerations, and by no means new, this tension between documentation and fabrication during the first decade of the LP era was a notable characteristic of the acoustic envelope of modernism. It was in this context of limits, pressures and changes over time that Columbia Masterworks released Marlene Dietrich Overseas as a 10-inch long-playing record in 1951.1 As the front cover announces – to the exclusion of the record’s actual title, which appears only on the back cover – the album consists of ‘American songs in German for the O.S.S.’, or Office of Strategic Services, the wartime intelligence bureau that was the

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direct precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Late in the war, under the auspices of its Morale Operations division, Dietrich had recorded a handful of American pop songs with specially adapted German lyrics, which were then clandestinely broadcast to military and civilian audiences in Axis and Axis-occupied countries as part of the effort to erode morale. The work was top secret at the time, and this chapter will return to it in its final section. For now, the note to accent is that the album does not present the wartime recordings, but provides in their place high-fidelity recordings of the same material. The question therefore arises why rerecordings of these songs were thought to have been appropriate for an audience of American hi-fi listeners: what did songs meant to undermine morale in one theatre of total war mean to do in the postwar home theatre? The sleeve notes describe how these songs went to war, did their work and vanished into the OSS files at Washington. Miss Dietrich, however, had copies of the recordings, and played them for Columbia’s Mitch Miller. He felt they were the best she had ever made, and asked her to remake them for Columbia Records. The result is this collection, a remarkable combination of completely personal popular singing and a working demonstration of part of the propaganda battle of World War II. In this gloss, the music on the LP has been redirected to home listeners, in recognition of the capacities of the new format to make ‘the best she ever made’ better, even as the propaganda function behind the music remains politically operative. With a wartime photograph of Dietrich in army boots and fatigues adorning the front cover, the notes on the back promise that the collection brings to the ear all the haunting, nostalgic allure one expects from Miss Dietrich, but, because of the unique nature of the material and the purpose for which these records were made, you will also hear undertones of deep sadness and feeling which represent Marlene Dietrich at her best. Meeting the expectations of nostalgia, yet also substantiating the once-secret motivation of the wartime recordings: here seems to be the pitch for the post-war rerecordings. Like so much good pop music, the album seeks to confirm expectations, in order to do something new or surprising with them – only in this case, the significance of the undertones of feeling and emotion the microphone renders has less to do with affective experience or subjective truth than with the rise of the national security state. When the needle drops, the new format serves as a medium not only of storage, but of amplification.

Intelligence Records: Bureaucratic Stacks One index to the work being done in that relationship of storage and amplification can be found in another set of records that ‘went to war, did their work and vanished’ into the stacks: this is the file the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) kept on Dietrich during these years. The extant documents in the file were declassified for the most part in 1996, and digitised copies of these items are currently accessible through the FBI’s electronic Freedom of Information Act library, known as The Vault.2 In the form now available, the file runs to 230 pages, all but the final 30 of which were made during

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the war years. These pages are marked by frequent redactions, primarily of names and other details that could be used to identify sources and methods, although in several instances larger portions of documents are blacked out. In addition, notations throughout the file indicate that documents were destroyed at various times between the creation of the original pages and the later process of duplication, first to microfilm and then as digital images. During the long and not always linear passage from classified to declassified status, redaction and document destruction were both routine means of handling protected or sensitive (or illegally obtained) material at intelligence agencies. In this, there is nothing odd or exceptional about the Dietrich file, as it moved from operational storage at the Bureau to institutional holding at the National Archives and Records Administration. While the stakes are not as high for the file on Dietrich as they are for those on other individuals and organisations subject to government surveillance, the range of agency prerogatives and procedures on display in her file still bears blunt witness to the unhampered intensity of the Bureau’s investigations. Even so, the significance of the file derives more from what it demonstrates about the administrative function that records serve than from the descriptive content of its documents. Beyond the evidential and informational values on which the appraisal and disposition of its documents rest, and for which they have been preserved, the Dietrich file is significant because of what it shows about the practice of records management within the Bureau.3 As items were added to the dossier over the years, they both took on and reinforced its prosecutorial demeanour. A study in control, the file exemplifies the organisational ability to define the relations among the documents collected within it and, still more decisively, to assimilate these relations to the Bureau’s system of operational knowledge.4 In short, the storage system was also a mechanism of amplification. The file on Dietrich provides an odd counterpoint to the political work of Marlene Dietrich Overseas. In his study of German émigrés in the wartime United States, Alexander Stephan provides a useful list of (some of) the federal agencies that undertook monitoring activities during these years. The jurisdictional outline alone testifies to how pervasive these activities were, while also suggesting the extent to which the government ignored or betrayed the history, experience and privacy of those falling under scrutiny. Based on extensive work with security files, Stephan notes: What the refugee writers scattered from New York to Los Angeles did not know and for the most part did not even guess was that almost all of them, admirers and critics of the United States alike, were under surveillance by secret agencies of their host nation, especially the FBI and the forerunner of the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services, along with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the State Department, the army’s Military Intelligence Division, the Office of Naval Intelligence, [and] the Un-American Activities Committee of the House of Representatives. (Stephan 2000: 2) Owing to its seniority and its zeal, the FBI was at the apex of this surveillance apparatus, a commanding and increasingly autonomous position that its records helped to guarantee: an ingenious system of card indexes and files, telephone tapping, mail interception, and a whole network of spies and informers supplied [J. Edgar] Hoover with

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information that allowed him to steer the decisions of other agencies, intervene in political developments, and influence legal proceedings. (Stephan 2000: 3) Compulsively maintained, these records were instrumental to the functioning of an array of other government agencies, which had to rely on cooperation, or compliance, with the Bureau. Because it was able to regulate access to its extensive files so thoroughly, the FBI also had considerable authority over their meaning and implications. As David Jenemann has observed, ‘such oversight and interpretation [were] not part of a grand conspiracy but, rather, [of] the day-to-day life of refugees and citizens alike in 1940s America’ (Jenemann 2007: xiv). In these efforts, record-keeping provided needed gain to items that, on their own, were thin or altogether lacked it. The earliest pieces in Dietrich’s file date from May 1942, almost three years after she had become an American citizen and nearly a decade after she had first come to the country. Whatever her legal status and regardless of her celebrity, the fact of her German birth made her a person of suspicion, and it is precisely this suspicion that the steady accumulation of documents in the file sustains and amplifies. Three items from across its span attest to this point. In a report from June 1942, agents in the Los Angeles field office follow up on rumours that Dietrich has hosted meetings of the German American Bund, the domestic, pro-Nazi group, in her home, and relay what their sources have told them: [Redacted] was interviewed by Agent [redacted]. She resides at [redacted] telephone [redacted] and upon interview she stated that she had no information; that she had heard from [redacted] whose name she could not recall, who was at one time working in a house near DIETRICH’S, that there were frequent meetings held in her home which [redacted] thought were Bund meetings. [Redacted] was going to obtain the name and address of [redacted] and advise this office. To date same has not been done, but should she have any information of interest to the Bureau, it will be reported. (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2003a: 38) The subsequent redaction only makes graphically literal how little there is, beyond suspicion, in this chain of negations, hedges and deferrals. Yet this suspicion echoed two and a half years later while Dietrich was on tour in Europe performing for troops with the United Service Organizations (USO), when the Bureau received this lead from an informant: ‘Dear Mr. Hoover,’ begins the typed letter. ‘It strikes me as rather strange that Miss Dietrich intends to do as the inclosed [sic] news item implies. She is German born.’ The enclosure is a small newspaper clipping of a wire service bulletin, which quotes Dietrich saying that she will forego making movies for the remainder of the war in order to devote herself to entertaining GIs. In thanks for the tip, the Bureau’s Communications Section sent the informant a form letter from J. Edgar Hoover: ‘Your courtesy and interest in bringing this information to my attention are indeed appreciated, and you may be assured your letter will receive appropriate consideration’ (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2003c: 25–7). While this reply seems only to say nothing in response to nothing, the letter’s formal acknowledgement of receipt in fact marks the completion of a scene of communication. Indeed, its semantic barrenness is a demonstration of the phatic function of the letter: its ritualised bureaucratese serves no other purpose than to comment on the channel or format of exchange, as a means

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of recognising the social conditions and expectations that link the parties engaged in the exchange.5 In doing so, the letter certifies the informant’s suspicion as something shared and ‘appreciated’, and this relationship in turn registers in the Bureau’s retention of a copy of the letter for its file. The reverberations of this boilerplate acknowledgement could still be discerned twenty-two years later. Giving ear to chatter and official sanction to cranks can perhaps be chalked up to wartime exigencies, yet a final, post-war item captures the amplifying effect of the entire file. Dating from March 1967, the third item is the summary of a background check the Bureau ran on Dietrich at the request of staff at the White House, where she had been invited to attend an unnamed affair: Captioned individual, well-known Hollywood personality, was the subject of a limited security-type inquiry conducted by the FBI in the early 1940’s based on allegations of a pro-Nazi nature. The investigation failed to substantiate those allegations and our files contain no additional pertinent information concerning her. (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2003d: 6) In phrasing the summary’s findings in this manner, the Bureau does not state that these allegations about Dietrich were false or baseless, but rather merely that they could not be verified. That the language of the summary may follow a generic standard or be an example of administrative jargon in no way obviates the point. It instead demonstrates the additive and amplificatory protocol governing the creation and maintenance of this paperwork. Documenting the tips of informants had achieved the taxonomic conversion of suspicion into allegation, but the post-war summary shows how allegations were available to be operationalised through the record-keeping at the Bureau. The item stands less as the residue of past defamation or insinuation or even misguided alarm than as the product of a filing system organised to retrieve active and actionable records. Decades after its creation, then, this repository of unsubstantiated ‘allegations of a pro-Nazi nature’ remained the measure against which Dietrich’s life was compared and checked.6 Designed to serve the Bureau’s agenda of keeping tabs, the system of records also came to authorise the perpetuation of its surveillance mandate. Here is the rationale for the Bureau’s practice of records control. The file now accessible online is the product of the conditions of secrecy and denial that shaped its creation and handling at the Bureau. The agency’s chequered compliance with the Freedom of Information Act stems directly from this administrative culture of unaccountability and unimpeded autonomy (Theoharis 1981; Theoharis 1984; Steinwell 1986). Although much of what it logs is drawn from casual observation, second-hand news and celebrity gossip, the file itself is information that never wanted to be free. Throughout its pages, aspects of Dietrich’s everyday life are singlemindedly enumerated: agents note that she drives a 1940 Buick convertible coupé and a Ford station wagon (estate car); that she orders flowers from a favourite florist; that she rents a safe deposit box; that she frequents the lunch counter at Schwab’s Drugstore at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Laurel Canyon, where an eavesdropping employee recounts she is often heard speaking German. Her cables are stopped and read; her postman is enlisted as an informant, with agents explicitly instructed not to divulge this relationship to the Post Office. Other details now severely redacted are listed as being for ‘near future use’ or of ‘possible future interest to [the] record’.

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Industry people appear to have been quite accommodating of agents’ enquiries, some equivocating on the question of Dietrich’s political allegiances and others pointedly clearing her: ‘Informant described DIETRICH as being too stupid to be a spy, that she is effeminately cruel and further described her as being “bitchy”’ (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2003b: 13). Still others tendered open secrets and innuendo for the profile the Bureau was assembling, and the documents often directly quote this brand of testimony: With reference to her personal history, Source [redacted] continued that ‘despite her marriage to [Rudolf] SIEBER, with whom she has not lived for many years, at least as long as she has been in the United States, DIETRICH has been promiscuous in a bland, glamorous sort of way. She, of course, was [Josef] VON STERNBERG’S mistress. DIETRICH has never been able to “hold a man.” She gets them and loses them in periods of amour ranging from “quickies” to “six months.” During her Paramount days, she verged from the norm for an affair with KAY FRANCIS (known Lesbian), and since that time has been involved in similar experiences, although less known. [Redacted]’s wife, [(]also a known Lesbian), reportedly once was given a large sapphire ring by DIETRICH in a night club on the Strip. Her usual technique, insofar as men are concerned (and her temporary success) was evinced by the way she went after JOHN WAYNE on Universal’s “Seven Sinners.” She saw him, liked him, and made advances. WAYNE is the father of three children and was at that time seemingly happily married. He repulsed DIETRICH, but she kept coming. She finally got him. This affair lasted about six months.[’] (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2003a: 42) Scarcely paraphrased, these particulars would later appear in a memorandum on the investigation into Dietrich that the Los Angeles field office prepared for J. Edgar Hoover, who is known to have maintained a considerable trove of information on sexual allegations: in the memo reproduced in the file, a reader has studiously underlined each line of the paragraph (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2003b: 3). Yet these details seem straight out of the scandal sheets and, indeed, now read like the forerunner to Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger’s notorious dilation on the whispers and half-truths of the movie industry’s early decades.7 Tasteless echoes aside, the surveillance dossier should not be mistaken for the sensationalism of the gutter press, with its limited repertoire of generic moves and reliable set of prompted reactions. The FBI file is, instead, a reference work, its emphasis less on its contents than on the amplificatory and self-confirming definitional power it exercises over them. For all the intensity of its focus, there is nothing quite personal about the dossier. The odd intimacy of its pages stems only from the proliferation of cross-references, forever held close by the Bureau and always of ‘possible future interest’. In retrospect, this material stands at an unpleasantly auspicious spot, where media persona shades into bureaucratic profile and everything is transfigured as an aggregate of data points. This tendency is most evident when agents enter Dietrich’s voice into her own file. With national mobilisation in full swing, Dietrich went to work on behalf of the war effort, travelling throughout the country to encourage Americans to buy war bonds and touring military camps with USO revues to entertain troops preparing to go overseas (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2003a: 53–60). As the course of

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the war in Europe then began to shift, she learned that she too would be sent to the fighting. While readying to depart in early 1944, Dietrich contacted the FBI about a letter she had received from a German prisoner of war claiming to be her cousin, who wished to begin a correspondence with her: in the file, a memorandum titled ‘Re: Marlene Dietrich; Offer of Services’ announces her approach to the Bureau. What follows is a remarkable section of the dossier. The memo notates what has caught her attention: Dietrich said the thing that disturbed her was [the prisoner’s] statement that he had so much to communicate to her. Also she observed that he addressed her as ‘Dear Marlene,’ using the German word which is not used unless one knows another rather well. A casual fan would have addressed her with a more formal word. Her apprehensions raised by this inappropriate intimacy, she asks the Bureau whether it would like her to respond and, if so, how. Before answering, however, the Bureau sends the letter to its criminal laboratory for cryptographic analysis, which does not ‘disclose anything indicative of a concealed code or cipher message or any evidence of double meaning’. With this report to hand, it decides to pursue her offer, and a translated copy of the dictated response to the prisoner, signed ‘Marlene’, appears later in the file. What, if any, channel of communication this reply opened the file does not describe. Instead, this section of the dossier ends with a note of instruction Hoover sent to agents in Paris and London in November 1944, while Dietrich was performing for the troops. After recapitulating the various allegations of disloyalty made against her, the dispatch concludes with an ode to control: Investigation has not been able to substantiate any such information. To the contrary, Miss Dietrich, as you know, has been developed into a special service contact of the Bureau prior to her present trip. Despite this proffer of assistance, the above information [on past investigations] is being brought to your attention so that you may exercise the requisite degree of judgment and caution in any future contacts you may have with Miss Dietrich. (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2003c: 6–23) Checked against the records, her own voice here serves to validate the procedures of record-keeping simply by becoming the latest entry in the file. In turn, Hoover’s memo provides phatic confirmation of this bureaucratic fact when it is shared with his subordinates. Having announced its wariness of unsolicited and undue familiarity, Dietrich’s voice here briskly assumes its place in the Bureau’s dossier as only one more item among its amplifying cross-references.

Intelligence Records: Bureaucratic Wax Whereas Hoover knew exactly what the circumstances were behind Dietrich being ‘developed into a special service contact of the Bureau’, it is not clear to what extent he would have been aware or informed of her work with the OSS. Several disputed jurisdictional boundaries and the reality of inter-agency rivalries make it difficult to sort out this relationship, and nothing about it appears in the Bureau’s file on Dietrich. At the same time, the agencies were like two grand chordal inversions arranged around

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a common tonal centre, with the activities of domestic law enforcement and foreign subversive operations working as complements within the totalised system of national security. The Morale Operations division at the OSS had been established in January 1943 and was modelled on Britain’s Political Warfare Executive, which oversaw the deployment and coordination of all forms of psychological warfare. In its sphere, the American division was given responsibility for ‘the conduct of subversion other than physical’, a mandate that soon gained a sharper operational focus: it is the function of the Morale Operations Branch to attack the morale and the political unity of the enemy through any primarily psychological means operating within or purporting to operate within the enemy or occupied territories. The principal means to be employed are field agents, native residents of the enemy and occupied countries, rumors, printed matter, and radio. (Roosevelt 1976 [1947]: 212, 215) While duplicity and guile were critical parts of the work of the division, its machinations were nevertheless most effective when belief could be manipulated in service to strategic ends, when the affirmed or plausible could become the source of dismay, as an internal evaluation of the OSS makes plain: Propaganda of ideas, in which truth should be the weapon and conversion the objective, must make room for ‘black’ propaganda which, through judicious mixture of rumor and deception with truth as a bait, fosters disunity and confusion to support military operations. (Roosevelt 1976 [1947]: 2)8 It was in this context of weaponised truth and calculated misrepresentation that Dietrich was recruited to work with Morale Operations. In mid-1944, not long after she had approached the FBI with the dubiously informal letter from the prisoner of war, the OSS division had received a request from the Political Warfare Executive to provide recordings of American pop songs with German lyrics for one of its clandestine radio stations known as Soldatensender West, which purported to be a German-run station broadcasting news and entertainment to the Wehrmacht. In order to entice listeners to the station’s talk programming, it was felt that popular music of the highest – indeed, the best – quality was necessary to capture the attention of the audience and hold it, to keep enemy soldiers tuned in for the spun features and tailored reports that comprised this form of psychological warfare. At the OSS, responsibility for this endeavour was given to members of J. Walter Thompson Company, an advertising agency based in New York, whose experience with writing catchy creative copy and integrating jingles into on-air programming would enable techniques of promotion and publicity to be used for purposes of subversion. Rather than hector or abuse listeners, these recruits mostly avoided overt ideological themes or conflicts and instead ‘approached psychological warfare as though they were selling toothpaste’ (Soley 1989: 99). For them, luring the greatest number of listeners to the secret station and its news bulletins was the goal, and all of their white-collar proficiencies and professional contacts within the entertainment industry were marshalled in the effort to reach it. Around the radio dial, the use of music as a kind of moral correlative in propaganda broadcasting was widespread, with musical selections meant to provide emotional cues and affective

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associations for the ongoing demands of total mobilisation (Bronfen 2012: 74–106; Fauser 2013: 76–134). For this clandestine assignment, the ad agency crew would create product that had no moral as such, but relied instead on its quality and the intensity of its appeal to listeners. The music could thus serve as an effective bridge to the news because it aimed only to be good entertainment. Their innovation was to recognise that audiences were increasingly aware of how music was being employed in propaganda broadcasting and to play to this awareness: listeners could remain knowing or suspicious consumers, yet still be entranced and get hooked by the songs. Like today’s clickbait, their work in this venture could trace its genealogy back to the methods of yellow journalism and the scandal pages, in which headlines attracted eyes and then rarely delivered quite what had been promised. This subterfuge was exactly what Morale Operations wanted. With the directive to begin their undertaking, the ad agency personnel set up a front corporation in New York in order to begin hiring musicians and booking studio time. Music would not be the message, but an adjunct to the messaging. This conjoining of advertising and entertainment under the aegis of psychological warfare became known within Morale Operations as the Muzac Project. In condensed form, the moniker announced the need for ‘musical action’, while also gesturing to the fact that work behind the project was done primarily in the studios of the Muzak Corporation in New York.9 There, arrangers, musicians and singers were told they were making recordings for the Voice of America and most often found themselves slightly recasting stock settings of popular songs and standards in order to ‘suit the German personality’ (Soley 1989: 125). Responsibility for translating lyrics fell largely to Lothar Metzl, an Austrian-born cabaret playwright who would later work as a research analyst for the CIA. With their crisp expression and semantic care, his translations earned the approval of his superiors, who in particular reserved praise for the manner in which his lyrics conveyed feelings of longing, loneliness and sadness to their intended audience. Whether with subtle humour or elegant melancholy, Metzl’s work used the specific qualities of the German language to carry the motivated sentiment of the songs (Mauch 2003: 151–62). Fine as his translations were, however, the songs became potent only once they were performed for the studio microphone, and it was in this position that Dietrich proved to be one of the Muzac Project’s greatest assets. For all the secrecy surrounding its work, she was informed of the true nature of the project, with her recording sessions taking place while she recovered in New York from a bout of pneumonia that had developed during one of her extended tours of the European frontlines. Despite this respiratory condition (which, in any case, would have been less evident to listeners of medium- and short-wave transmissions), her vocal performances have been hailed for their affective candour and expressive impact: ‘for an actress known for her emotional remove, the strength of her German-language performances was her sincerity’ (Baade 2012: 95). This quality was an effect of the studio microphone, which enabled her voice not only to be the vehicle of Metzl’s wistful lyrics, but to be rendered within the musical setting precisely as a German voice, with its own articulatory gestures, prosodic features and phonetic rhythms (Frith 1996: 183–202). As objects of the studio microphone, that is, Dietrich’s vocal performances were available to be amplified in the recording process and thereby to communicate elements of tenderness and familiarity across the separation and absence of wartime. Like all 312 made for Morale Operations between July 1944 and April 1945, Dietrich’s recordings

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were pressed to 16-inch, 33-rpm vinylite discs and sent to London for broadcast (Soley 1989: 127). In the words of the War Department’s report assessing the work of the OSS, the Muzac Project was ‘one of MO’s most proficient and worthwhile achievements’ (Roosevelt 1976 [1947]: 219). To ask again the opening question of this chapter: why might an album of rerecordings of these clandestine songs of war have been deemed appropriate for a post-war audience at home? For one thing, the business model of the entertainment industry asserted the commercial appeal of such material. The sleeve notes recount how, when Dietrich had played her personal copies of the wartime recordings for Mitch Miller, the legendary Artists and Repertoire (A&R) man at Columbia, he had suggested that she rerecord the songs. Years later, to one of her biographers, he stressed the importance to this decision of the technological advantages of the LP era: ‘I talked to her about breathing . . . and the conscious things she could do with it. We recorded on monaural high-fidelity tape, on which only the most minimal kind of cutting and splicing was possible, and when she concentrated on the artistic, rather than the “historical” value of what she was doing, her ear took over. It was all spontaneous craft, no tracking, no splicing, all performing.’ (qtd in Bach 1992: 363–4, emphasis in original) In this telling, the enhanced sonic definition of the recording medium promises a kind of immediacy to Dietrich’s performance, a faithfulness that would render her ‘breathing’ and ‘the conscious things she could do with it’ as though not rendering them at all. The kind of closeness that Miller extols and that listeners hear as intimacy nevertheless relies on extreme vocal isolation. It is a premier effect of amplification. Recorded close to the microphone and in an acoustically dead studio room or vocal booth, Dietrich’s voice has no reverberation, and this lack of sonic reflection causes it to sound as though it comes from a very nearby point. In the field of the recording, this sonic space is distinct from that of the instrumental accompaniment, with her voice presented higher than and in front of the musicians. Recorded and mixed in this way, the high-fidelity versions of the songs place Dietrich’s voice in a singular position, at once close by and quite alone. This placement is particularly evident in the album’s rendition of ‘Mean to Me’, for which Dietrich gave this paraphrase of its German lyrics on the back sleeve: ‘Be good to me; don’t come to me like a thief at night. My love for you is so far greater than you think. Be good to me; all I have done was to love you and be good to you.’ This note gives the gist of the translation, but leaves out its lyrical hook. Where the English original resolves on a double entendre (‘You’re mean to me / why must you be mean to me? / You shouldn’t for can’t you see / what you mean to me’), Metzl’s German version centres on the use of the formal second-person pronoun: ‘Sei lieb zu mir / komm nicht / wie ein dieb zu mir / sag nicht immer Sie zu mir / wenn andere dabei sind’ (‘be good to me, don’t come like a thief to me, don’t always say [formal] You to me, when others are around’).10 In the recording, the voice asks why her lover addresses her only as one does a stranger, an intimate question about unreliable or betrayed or altogether dubious intimacy. It is an untranslatable hook that sounds twice, first as a sung and then as a spoken entreaty; and although the repetition amplifies the plea, it also suggests that it has remained unreceived, that the condition of intimacy remains at best uncertain. To what audience of listeners was this song of

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feigned closeness addressed? While American home listeners very likely did not follow the lyrical turn, they could still hear the ‘haunting, nostalgic allure’ of the close-miked voice placed in their domestic midst. In the living room, this sound effect is not one of intimacy, but only of amplification. Taking a cue from the design of the front sleeve of the album, however, it is possible to discern another reason for its release beyond the cash nexus. Alongside the wartime photograph of Dietrich, and the words ‘Columbia Records’ and the LP logo that appear between her combat boots, the visual field of the cover is completed by the large letters ‘OSS’, printed in imitation military stencil, and it is this triangulation of graphic features that points to the final amplification at issue. The OSS had been disbanded at the end of the war, and much of the work it had done in the conflict remained classified and unknown to the American public. Before the conclusion of hostilities, its leadership had already begun to seek ways quietly to publicise its role in the war effort and, in this way, to certify and promote its function as an agency of government. Like using truth as bait, these overtures played up its support for and assistance to the service branches, but kept silent about the practical import of the organisation for life after the end of declared war. In the War Department’s report on the agency, the rationale behind this stratagem is spelled out: The public did not realize, and it is quite possible that some of the initiated did not comprehend fully, the significance and potential value to America of developing the doctrine of unorthodox warfare; in providing a foundation for the American practice of espionage and counter-espionage which could be projected into the future; in providing a basis of experience for the various aspects of morale and physical subversion which could be used in the future should a war crisis arise; and in promulgating the principle of a central intelligence agency. (Roosevelt 1976 [1947]: 120) As in the clandestine wartime operations, these promotional activities leveraged connections to the worlds of advertising and entertainment, in order to sell the national security state and its intelligence apparatus as the necessary guarantors of civilian life (Mauch 2003: 217–20). Even after the formation of the CIA in 1947 had instituted the ‘principle’ and practices of the OSS as a permanent part of the American state, the aura of wartime service remained an alluringly useful means to validate the claims and assumptions underlying the successor agency’s function. When Dietrich and Miller first thought to revisit the wartime material for commercial release, she had to request formal permission to do so from none other than William Donovan, the former director of the OSS, so that they might proceed with the rerecording plan (Mauch 2003: 285 n83). His consent to the project indicates how, in official circles, the value of the material lay not with wartime recordings, but with wartime mystique and the sanction it would provide to the ongoing affirmation of the ‘principle of a central intelligence agency’. In its way, then, the resulting album is ‘a working demonstration of part of the propaganda battle of World War II’ that, for domestic listeners, continues on new terrain. For while Marlene Dietrich Overseas stores a wide range of complicated historical dynamics, the album was a platform for propagating and amplifying the founding ideology of the national security state. That it remains such a platform the CIA has confirmed with one of the tweets it sent out in 2017 to mark the seventyfifth anniversary of the establishment of the OSS: ‘During #WWII, Marlene Dietrich

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recorded a number of anti-Nazi albums in German for the #OSS’ (Central Intelligence Agency 2017). Framed by hashtags, the historical errors of the message only reaffirm the phatic value of ‘haunting, nostalgic allure’ to the political work being done on behalf of its sender. Accompanying this text is an image of the front cover of the album of songs Dietrich had rerecorded sixty-six years earlier, as once more the LP is pressed into the service of those who wage war by other means.

Notes   1. This being an unsettled moment in the record business, the album was also released as a 45-rpm double 7-inch, before it eventually appeared, with several bonus tracks, as a 33-rpm 12-inch record.   2. For the homepage, see (last accessed 25 January 2022). The Bureau notes the digital copies have been made available online ‘so you can read them in the comfort of your home or office’.   3. The language of ‘evidential’ and ‘informational’ values within the process of document appraisal comes from Schellenberg (1956) and (2003 [1956]).   4. James Beniger defines control as ‘purposive influence toward a predetermined goal’ and strongly links it to information processing and communication (Beniger 1986: 7–9).   5. The phatic function in communication has a distinctly modernist history. In 1923, Bronislaw Malinowski gave the name ‘phatic communion’ to the ‘type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words’, to the kind of speech that created and maintained social bonds among speakers, but outside of the need to impart information (Malinowski (1966 [1923]: 315). In 1958, Roman Jakobson revised this notion in order to account for the function that addresses the qualities of the channel, or what he calls the ‘contact’, between addresser and addressee (Jakobson 1987 [1958]: 66–9).   6. Beniger notes that the word ‘control’ derives from ‘the medieval Latin verb contrarotulare, to compare something “against the rolls,” the cylinders of paper that served as official records in ancient times’ (Beniger 1986: 8).   7. For comparison’s sake: ‘By all accounts a joyous bisexual with an appetite for many loves, Marlene kept the magpies chirping right through the Thirties. Her passel of girlfriends was dubbed “Marlene’s Sewing Circle.” They were not lesbians . . ., but good-time Charlenes who, like Marlene, swung both ways.’ The passage continues with a paean to Dietrich’s trousers (her ‘man-drag’) and an account of her relationship with Sternberg (‘her Svengali’) (Anger [1959] 1975: 246–55).   8. A shorter version of this statement, but attributed to William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, director of the OSS, appeared in the catalogue to a commemorative exhibition on the wartime agency (Central Intelligence Agency 2015: 26). In this source, ‘black propaganda’ is defined as ‘information that looked and sounded like it originated with the enemy’ (13).   9. Different sources offer variant spellings of the name of this project. I follow Roosevelt’s official report in giving it as ‘Muzac’, although even there it is rendered entirely in capital letters. 10. I am grateful to my friend and colleague Jasmina Tumbas, who provided me with an English translation of Metzl’s German lyrics.

Works Cited Anger, Kenneth (1975 [1959]), Hollywood Babylon. New York: Dell. Baade, Christina (2012), ‘Between the Lines: “Lili Marlene,” Sexuality, and the Desert War’, in Music, Politics, and Violence, ed. Susan Fast and Kip Pegley. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

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Bach, Stephen (1992), Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend. New York: William Morrow and Company. Barry, Eric D. (2010), ‘High-Fidelity Sound as Spectacle and Sublime, 1950–1961’, in Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. David Sussman and Susan Strasser. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Beniger, James (1986), The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bronfen, Elisabeth (2012), Specters of War: Hollywood’s Engagement with Military Conflict. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Central Intelligence Agency (2015), OSS Exhibition Catalogue. Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence. Central Intelligence Agency [@CIA] (2017), ‘During #WWII, Marlene Dietrich recorded a number of anti-Nazi albums in German for the #OSS’, Twitter, 27 June, (last accessed 25 January 2022). Dietrich, Marlene (1951), Marlene Dietrich Overseas. Columbia Records ML 2615, LP. Fauser, Annegret (2013), Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II. New York: Oxford University Press. Federal Bureau of Investigation (2003a), ‘Subject: Marlene Dietrich (Part 1)’, Washington, DC, (last accessed 25 January 2022). Federal Bureau of Investigation (2003b), ‘Subject: Marlene Dietrich (Part 2)’, Washington, DC, (last accessed 25 January 2022). Federal Bureau of Investigation (2003c), ‘Subject: Marlene Dietrich (Part 3)’, Washington, DC, (last accessed 25 January 2022). Federal Bureau of Investigation (2003d), ‘Subject: Marlene Dietrich (Part 4)’, Washington, DC, (last accessed 25 January 2022). Frith, Simon (1996), Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gelatt, Roland (1955), The Fabulous Phonograph. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Jakobson, Roman (1987 [1958]), ‘Linguistics and Poetics’, in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jenemann, David (2007), Adorno in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Malinowski, Bronislaw (1966 [1923]), ‘The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages’, in The Meaning of Meaning, ed. C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Mauch, Christof (2003), The Shadow War Against Hitler, trans. Jeremiah M. Riemer. New York: Columbia University Press. Roosevelt, Kermit, ed. (1976 [1947]), War Report of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), Vol. 1. New York: Walker and Company. Schellenberg, T. R. (1956), The Appraisal of Modern Public Records. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. Schellenberg, T. R. (2003 [1956]), Modern Archives: Principles and Techniques. Chicago: Society of American Archivists. Schicke, C. A. (1974), Revolution in Sound: A Biography of the Recording Industry. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Soley, Lawrence (1989), Radio Warfare: OSS and CIA Subversive Propaganda. New York: Praeger. Steinwell, Susan (1986), ‘Appraisal and the FBI Files Case: For Whom Do Archivists Retain Records?’, American Archivist, 49: 1 (Winter), pp. 52–63.

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Stephan, Alexander (2000), Communazis: FBI Surveillance of German Émigré Writers, trans. Jan van Huerck. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Theoharis, Athan (1981), ‘The FBI and the FOIA: Problems in Access and Destruction’, The Midwestern Archivist, 5: 2, pp. 61–74. Theoharis, Athan (1984), ‘Researching the Intelligence Agencies: The Problem of Covert Activities’, The Public Historian, 6: 2 (Spring), pp. 67–76. Theoharis, Athan (2004), ‘Secrecy and Power: Unanticipated Problems in Researching FBI Files’, Political Science Quarterly, 119: 2 (Summer), pp. 271–90.

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Part III Bodies

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17 Sex: Hypnosis, Hormones, Birth Control and the Modernist Body Jana Funke

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owards the end of A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf introduces the imaginary figure of Mary Carmichael, the young female author of a book called Life’s Adventure. Carmichael represents a new generation of modern writers that has the potential to ‘light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been’ (Woolf 2001: 72). Woolf’s narrator hopes that Carmichael will write in novel ways about aspects of life that have not yet received adequate treatment in literature, including love, desire and intimate friendship between women, the experiences of the ‘harlot’ and ‘courtesan’, and other previously obscure or taboo topics (Woolf 2001: 76). The name of Woolf’s modern author is a reference to Marie Carmichael Stopes, a trained palaeobotanist, who, by the end of the 1920s, had established herself as the leader of the British birth control movement and as a key voice in eugenic circles. She had also made a name for herself as the author of marital and sexual advice literature, including the bestseller Married Love (1918). Woolf’s nod to Stopes’s controversial work suggests that the production of modern literature, especially by women, was inevitably connected not only with questions around sexuality, the body and reproduction, but also with scientific and technological innovation, including birth control. Following Woolf’s lead, this chapter explores the link between modernist literature, scientific and eugenic constructions of bodily sex and sexuality, and new technologies of intimacy and the body. Literary modernism and sexual science emerged in tandem in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Bauer 2009; Kahan 2019; Leng 2018; Peppis 2014; Schaffner 2011). The modernist period is also associated with an acceleration of technologies that opened up new ways of understanding and controlling sex and sexuality. This chapter focuses on three interrelated technological interventions that played a prominent role in sexual scientific and literary modernist writings: hypnosis and attempts to influence sexual orientation, hormonal interventions to control physical markers of sex and age, and birth control. While sexual scientists and literary writers were often drawn to the idea that human bodies and desires could be manipulated and controlled, the chapter also demonstrates that scientific and literary authors were equally fascinated by the potential inadequacies and productive uncertainties associated with modern technologies. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed important changes in the construction of ‘sex’, a term that held various unstable meanings at the time, cutting across biological sex, gender identity and gender presentation, and sexual desire. Different markers of bodily sex abounded in this period. British physiologist Ernest

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Starling formally coined the term ‘hormones’ in 1905 to refer to blood-borne chemical messengers (Starling 1905: 6). His discovery renewed interest in glandular secretions, which were seen to control mental and physical sex characteristics (Sengoopta 2006). The same year, American geneticists Nettie M. Stevens and Edmund B. Wilson proposed that two kinds of microscopic entities, the X- and Y-chromosomes, determined sex in most biological organisms (Brush 1978). With regard to sexual desire, late nineteenthcentury Western European sexual scientists began to construct sexuality as an object of scientific study. They invented new identity categories, including ‘the homosexual’, ‘the sadist’, ‘the masochist’ and ‘the transvestite’, to classify people on the basis of their sexual interests (Bland and Doan 1998). In the first decades of the twentieth century, knowledge about sexological categories was circulated via mass print media and film, thus reaching wider audiences who began to identify with these new labels. For heterosexual and bisexual people, and women in particular, increased knowledge about new methods of birth control opened up freedoms to control and limit reproduction and to renegotiate the meanings of intimacy between men and women (Cook 2004). Birth control was also misused as a eugenic technology to try to limit the reproduction of people deemed ‘unfit’ (Childs 2001; English 2004; Turda 2010). Such new scientific and technological discoveries promised to make the sexed body and its desires transparent and controllable. As Foucault and many others have argued, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sexual science sought to discipline the body, its pleasures and reproductive functions (Foucault 1990). This was achieved both through the power of science to assert the truth status of its knowledge claims and through the marketisation of a range of techno-scientific products, including hypnotic techniques, hormonal transplants and stimulants, and birth control devices – to name but a few. Modernist scholars have shown that literary modernist writers and sexual scientists shared a fascination with attempts to discipline the body. Tim Armstrong, for instance, has influentially examined a ‘surgical’ or ‘prosthetic’ branch of modernist culture that partakes in this project through literary innovation (Armstrong 1998). In this reading, modernism is most clearly aligned with techno-scientific interventions when seeking to control the body and offer prosthetic augmentation for its perceived lack. This chapter provides much evidence to support this important argument, but also considers other resonances between modernist literature and sexual science. Sexual scientific studies and technological interventions rarely delivered straightforward truths or solutions. The perceived or actual novelty of these discourses also acted as a constant reminder that sexual possibilities were radically open to renegotiation in the modern world. As we shall see, literary modernists responded to the uncertainties and failures of techno-scientific modernity not only by seeking disciplinary power, but also by amplifying and embracing the unknowable and uncontrollable aspects of the sexed body and desire. This gave rise to constructions of fractured modernist subjects deeply entangled with techno-scientific frameworks that not only served to control and contain, but also to open up new questions about the meanings and purposes of sex and sexuality.

Hypnotic Control and Sexual Attraction Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sexual scientists were fascinated with questions of aetiology. In particular, they debated whether and to what extent sexuality could be shaped by external influences and modified through biological, psychological

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or behavioural interventions. Partly in response to public fears that young people could be corrupted and seduced into same-sex relationships, reform-oriented sexual scientists like Havelock Ellis in Britain and Magnus Hirschfeld in Germany began to present sexual orientation as congenital or inborn (Funke 2013; Funke and Fisher 2019). Presenting homosexuality as a natural and unchanging trait that affected only a small, biologically predisposed minority offered a powerful means to oppose arguments about so-called corruption and seduction, and to counter the moral condemnation and criminalisation of same-sex desire. However, the congenital model was not the only construction of sexuality to be found in early twentieth-century sexual science. Even sexual scientists invested in congenital explanations acknowledged that there were external factors that could powerfully shape an individual’s desire, including the weather, diet or ‘obscene’ literature and art (Kahan 2019: 1). There were also widespread fears that modernity, urbanisation and new technologies like ‘tubes and cinema shows’ could disrupt individuals’ allegedly natural heterosexual desires (Stopes 1918: 12–13). According to Stopes, this could lead to a lack of heterosexual intimacy and diminish women’s ‘spontaneous sex-impulse’ altogether (Stopes 1918: 33). Ellis went further in suggesting that ‘there are many influences in our civilisation today which encourage’ expressions of homosexual desire (Ellis and Symonds 2008: 177). Accordingly, constructions of sexuality were closely intertwined with understandings of and anxieties around technology and influence. The idea that sexuality could be shaped by external influences also inspired sexual scientists like Auguste Forel, Albert Moll or Albert von Schrenck-Notzing to explore technologies that could be used to alter same-sex attraction and reduce other ‘undesirable’ sexual behaviours, including masturbation (Forel 1906: 229; Moll 1921; Schrenck-Notzing 1895). Although the efficacy of such interventions was widely debated, sexual scientists were particularly interested in the use of hypnotic technologies (Wolffram 2009: 94–5). The term hypnotism was coined by the surgeon James Braid in 1840, originally in an attempt to reclaim earlier states of trance associated with Franz Anton Mesmer, an eighteenth-century physician who had claimed to use magnetic forces to put his patients in a trance. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, hypnosis became a topic of vibrant debate among researchers situated within and across the fields of sexual science and psychical research, the scientific study of occult phenomena. The concerns of psychical research – including hypnosis, telepathy and mediumistic communication with the dead – offered rich frameworks to theorise intimacy, attraction and desire and spoke to a wider modernist fascination with technologies of ‘cultural transmission and communication’ (Thurschwell 2001: 16). Central to this discourse of magia sexualis, as Benjamin Kahan has called the sexual scientific fascination with the magical and occult (2019: 66–84), was a tension between a desire for the control of inner states and the recognition that the individual mind was porous and vulnerable to external influences. While hypnosis was presented as a technology that could help individuals manage sexual impulses, hypnotic suggestion could never quite free itself from associations with quackery and abuses of power, going back to its disavowed mesmeric roots in the early nineteenth century. Freud, like many other clinicians, moved away from hypnosis as a therapeutic method, but nevertheless saw it as a useful way of understanding the experience of love in which the ego is at risk of becoming consumed (Freud 2001: 111–16). Similarly, literary modernist authors drew on the language of hypnosis within their works to explore

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interpersonal bonds and flows of communication between individuals. In Mina Loy’s novel Insel, published posthumously in 1991, for instance, the highly ambiguous relationship between the art dealer and writer Mrs Jones and the elusive Surrealist painter Insel is conducted through the mysterious magnetic rays that Insel emits and which Jones is capable of receiving like a radio or a ‘televisionary machinery’ (Loy 1991: 167; Gaedtke 2008). Through this non-verbal communication, which is presented as analogous to new communication technologies, Jones can access and derive pleasure from Insel’s surreal visions. She also feels, however, that her sense of self is at risk of being corrupted and invaded by these foreign hypnotic rays. Loy’s feminist novel uses the language of hypnosis to expose both the pleasures and the risks that individuals can experience in intimate relationships with others. Paradoxically, given attempts to use hypnosis to ‘cure’ homosexuality, hypnotic influence was also evoked to caution against the alleged dangers of same-sex desires. In the UK, Oscar Wilde was presented as having magnetic and hypnotic powers that would seduce younger men (Thurschwell 2001: 37–8). This association of hypnosis with queer corruption persisted in the 1920s, when Radclyffe Hall was accused of seducing the married Una Troubridge ‘through psychical research’ (Medd 2012: 77). In 1928, Hall was famously charged with writing The Well of Loneliness, a book that was banned as obscene because of its allegedly poisonous and corruptive influence on England’s youth. In this context, literature itself was constructed as a technology that could lead to what Valerie Rohy has theorised as homosexual reproduction, the passing on of queer desire (2015: 22–55). Queer modernist authors challenged and reworked the seduction argument through an engagement with hypnotic frameworks. Towards the end of E. M. Forster’s Bildungs­ roman, Maurice, largely written in 1913–14 and published posthumously in 1971, the protagonist seeks the help of an American hypnotist, Dr Lasker Jones, to try to rid himself of his desire for other men. The attempt fails and backfires: Maurice’s encounter with the doctor only serves to affirm his self-identification as ‘a young invert’, a person experiencing ‘[c]ongenital homosexuality’ (Forster 2005: 190, 160). Here, Forster seems to embrace the inborn model promoted by sexual scientists like Ellis in Britain. The hypnotic session is not without effect, however, and Forster does rely on a hypnotic understanding of desire in the novel. While the hypnotist cannot alter the patient’s desires, the hypnotic session confirms that Maurice is ‘open to suggestion’ and ends with one of his recurrent homoerotic dreams in which he hears the beckoning voice of a mysterious male friend, which has infiltrated his imagination, seemingly against his will (Foster 2005: 162). Hypnosis does not allow Maurice to redirect his sexuality at will; rather, it enables him to connect more deeply with his body and its desires, and to realise that his lover, Alec’s, hypnotic influence is not ‘against his will’ or, indeed, his nature (Forster 2005: 189). In this sense, hypnotic suggestion reveals a desire that is already natural for Maurice, but that nevertheless needs to be accessed through hypnotic technologies and forms of exchange. With Alec, who is explicitly written as a bisexual character for whom ‘it’s “natural” to care both for women and men’ (Forster 2005: 197), Forster goes further in suggesting that even men who are not ‘congenital inverts’ can be drawn to other men through the hypnotic pull of attraction. In Maurice, as in other queer modernist works, ‘mesmeric exchange enables the flow of desire’, to such an extent that even so-called ‘natural’ desires become accessible only through technological mediation (Armstrong 2018: 124).

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Forster also engages critically with anxieties about the potentially damaging impact of modern technologies. As mentioned above, some of his contemporaries believed that modern technologies could have a harmful impact on allegedly natural heterosexual desires. Forster turns this heteronormative argument on its head when Maurice’s first partner, Clive, is converted to heterosexuality, partially due to his touristic travels in Greece and his engagement with the hypnotic technologies of mass culture, including ‘the advertisements, the daily papers’ and the ‘cinema palace’ (Forster 2005: 104). This conversion is described in strikingly pathological terms as a form of ‘illness’ that results in Clive’s ultimately unfulfilling heterosexual marriage (Forster 2005: 103). Here, Forster suggests again that desire is always mediated through and vulnerable to technological influences, which can either alienate individuals from themselves or connect them more deeply with their own feelings and needs.

Hormonal Interventions, Rejuvenation and Sexual Mobility Hypnosis was not the only technology that was used to influence and even change sexual desire. The early twentieth century also witnessed the rise of hormonal interventions, which were believed to affect a wide range of physical and mental phenomena. Although the study of glandular secretions was not new in itself, the 1910s and 1920s witnessed the rise of endocrinology as a medical discipline. Sexual scientists like Ellis, Freud and Hirschfeld quickly began to engage with endocrinological models according to which hormones regulated ‘not only primary, but also secondary sexual characteristics as well as sexual orientation and even certain forms of behaviour, speech or thoughts that could be read as gendered’ (Sengoopta 2006: 3). They hoped that endocrinology could provide new ways of understanding and treating what was, at the time, understood as the nexus of sex, gender and sexuality, cutting ‘across the psyche– soma boundary’ (Hausman 2006: 38). Before the arrival of synthetic hormones, sex glands were implanted or manipulated through surgical and electric technologies. The goal was to regulate hormonal secretions in order to restore youth and sexual proficiency, change sexual orientation or carry out gender-affirming interventions (Armstrong 1998: 131–83; Gill-Peterson 40–56; Sengoopta 2006; Stark 2020: 24–67). The dream that hormonal interventions might make it possible to control human bodies and minds in previously unimaginable ways found expression in the rejuvenation hype of the 1920s, a decade that Chandak Sengoopta has described as ‘the heroic age of the endocrine glands’ (2006: 69). Russian-born surgeon Serge Voronoff suggested that animal sex glands should be transplanted into humans to reinvigorate their glandular secretions. Austrian physiologist Eugen Steinach pioneered a less invasive alternative: for male patients, the so-called ‘Steinach treatment’ consisted of the ligation of the vas deferens, a treatment that would nowadays be described as a vasectomy. Influential modernist figures like Jean Cocteau, Freud and W. B. Yeats underwent the procedure in the hope of restoring lost youth, virility, potency and energy. This fascination with male rejuvenation was closely tied to concerns about gender and sexuality. Armstrong argues that anti-ageing treatments for men were ‘a response to contemporary fears, in America and Europe, of masculine decline’ (1998: 149). Especially during and after the First World War, the promise that technological interventions could help to restore male strength and virility alongside sexual desire resonated with eugenic concerns about the health and fitness of the nation. Steinach

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and his followers maintained that rejuvenation was harder to achieve for women, but could be attempted by using electric technologies, especially X-rays and natural or artificial ultraviolet light, to stimulate the function of the ovaries (Stark 2020: 38–9). While reinforcing normative eugenic ideals of youthful beauty, health and productivity, rejuvenation procedures were also subversive in eliminating women’s reproductive functions, thus presenting an image of desirable femininity that was not necessarily tied to procreative duties (Sengoopta 1998: 94). The prospect of female rejuvenation inspired diverse responses from literary authors in the interwar period and, at times, opened up feminist and queer possibilities. Gertrude Atherton, who had herself received the Steinach treatment from sexual scientist Harry Benjamin to cure her writer’s block, celebrated the intervention in her popular novel Black Oxen (1923) (Sengoopta 1998: 90–4). The book features a successfully rejuvenated middle-aged heroine who regains her vitality, beauty and sexual allure. Marie Corelli’s The Young Diana: An Experiment with the Future (1918) offers a more critical feminist assessment of the cult of youth. Corelli’s protagonist is a spinster who is ‘considered useless’ and ‘superfluous’ by society (Corelli 1918: 75). Unsatisfied with life, she decides to fake her own death and leave her parents to undergo a dangerous medical experiment and recover her youth. In the process, Diana gains youthful beauty and energy, but also loses access to human emotions and vulnerabilities. She becomes ‘enwrapt in a strange world of unknown experience’ and transcends the patriarchal society that has previously rejected her (Corelli 1918: 380; Hallim 2002: 90). The rejuvenation plot also inspired queer writers like Radclyffe Hall. The protagonist of Hall’s short story ‘Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself’, written in 1926 and published in 1934, is a spinster who has served in the First World War and experiences deep frustration upon return to England. During a spontaneous trip to an island off the coast of Devon, Ogilvy travels in time and magically transforms into a youthful Stone Age man, who finds sexual fulfilment with a female partner. In an earlier draft of the text, which remained unpublished during Hall’s lifetime, Ogilvy transforms into a youthful Stone Age woman with a male lover. In this version, the narrative trajectory is even more closely aligned with other rejuvenation stories of the period (Hall 2016: 171–82). In either case, for Hall, as for other modernist writers, rejuvenation was closely intertwined with other forms of transitioning related to the sexed body, gender and sexuality. Concerns with youth are also central to Lili Elbe’s semi-fictional co-authored memoir Man into Woman, which engages explicitly with contemporary medical constructions of the hormonal body (Meyer 2015: 79–221). Modernist scholars have tended to read the text as an early trans memoir that reflects wider modernist concerns with gender performativity (Caughie 2013) or attempts to control and remake the plastic body through technological and literary interventions (Armstrong 1998: 159–83). Yet, as Emma Heaney has shown, what this allegorical reading of trans femininity obscures is the fact that ‘[m]odernists responded to the new modern mobility of femininity and feminization, not the breakdown of gender’ (2017: 17). As Heaney explains, trans femininity does not signal a queer undoing of gender, but rather demonstrates that the category of woman has never been defined by a narrow cisnormative standard in the first place (2017: 20). At the same time, Man into Woman reveals that the surgical interventions Elbe sought in the late 1920s and early 1930s, which included the transplantations of ovaries and a uterus, were available only within a healthcare

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system that was built to uphold precisely this standard. This medicalising framework, as Kadji Amin has demonstrated in his important reading of Elbe’s memoir as a rejuvenation narrative, reinforced a eugenic ideal of ‘youthful, vigorous, feminine European womanhood’ (2018: 598) that Elbe, as a white European woman, could access. Although Elbe has generally been read as a trans woman, she understood herself to be intersexed and believed that her underdeveloped ovaries needed to be reactivated through the transplantation of younger gonadal tissue. For Elbe and her doctors, her surgeries ‘are as much about rejuvenation as they are a means of changing the markers of Lili’s bodily sex: by obtaining the ovaries of a woman in her twenties, Lili becomes young again’ (Amin 2018: 592). As such, Elbe’s memoirs can usefully be read as part of wider modernist explorations of feminine mobility that were often informed by eugenic ideologies. While popular reports of rejuvenation treatments and gender-affirming surgeries in the interwar period suggested that the hormonal body could be controlled at will, such treatments also inspired widespread scepticism about the powers of modern science and technology. Literary authors often presented glandular experiments and the (usually male) doctors who carried out these procedures in highly satirical and critical ways, as novels like Corelli’s The Young Diana, discussed above, as well as Bertram Gayton’s The Gland Stealers (1922) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and After Many a Summer (1939), demonstrate (Armstrong 2018: 232–3). Literary caricatures of megalomaniac endocrinologists aside, many scientists openly acknowledged that the hormonal body and its secretions remained a mystery that could not yet be manipulated at will. The notion that organisms were controlled by a delicate mixture of internal secretions also drew attention to the fact that bodily sex, gender and sexual desire were open to change and could not easily be labelled or categorised on the basis of rigid taxonomic systems. In an article published in the inaugural issue of the journal Endocrinology in 1917, for instance, geneticist Richard Goldschmidt described his experiments with intersex moths that were bred to combine male and female markers (Linge 2021; Richmond 2007). Some of these moths initially presented as female and then as male, whereas others started out as male and then developed as female. According to Goldschmidt, this observation reveals how little was known about sexual development: The knowledge of the mechanism which distributes in the right way those things which are responsible for the ultimate differentiation of male and female sex might be compared with information about the system of tracks and switches within a railroad station, which direct the trains into different directions. But this knowledge does not furnish any information about the material, the destiny, the loads, or the moving power of the trains. (1917: 436) Goldschmidt compares sex development and, by extension, the living organism to railway networks, which featured prominently in the Victorian and modernist imagination. This use of technological metaphors of transport and communication was characteristic of early twentieth-century constructions of the hormonal body. In his influential 1905 Croonian Lectures, Starling described hormones as ‘chemical messengers [. . .] speeding from cell to cell along the blood stream’ (1905: 6). In so doing, he evoked a ‘body-as-communication-network metaphor’ that resonated with

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later scientists (Jensen 2015: 335; Koerber 2018: 85–6). In Goldschmidt’s article, likening the organism to a moving train puts emphasis on mobility and change rather than presenting sex as fixed and static. The metaphor also foregrounds the complexity of sex development, which is presented as a largely unpredictable process involving multiple intersecting parts. Far from presenting bodily sex as fully controllable or even knowable, endocrinological studies drew attention to the mystery and open-ended nature of developmental processes, which were not necessarily linear or teleological. This dimension of endocrinological science resonated strongly with modernist writers. Woolf’s Orlando (1928) is overtly written in opposition to a modern scientific project that seeks to understand and categorise the human body and its desires. Yet, the novel’s recognition that ‘[d]ifferent though the sexes are, they intermix’ (Woolf 2008: 181), its wider celebration of sexual fluidity and its playful engagement with delayed ageing can also be read in dialogue with contemporary scientific constructions, especially of the hormonal body (Kahan 2013: 355–6). Modernist authors and scientists even made use of similar imagery to convey this sense of sexual mobility. Like Goldschmidt, Woolf draws on metaphors related to modern technologies of travel and transportation in her work: Orlando concludes with a joyful ride in a motorcar and the thrilling apparition of an aeroplane, which signal queer and trans possibilities in the text. Travel via car, train and boat also offers Hall an important means to represent sexual mobility in ‘Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself’, as Laura Doan has shown (2007). As such, the hormonal body held various conflicting meanings, representing the promise of complete technological control, as well as the fascination with the mystery and variability of sexual development.

Birth Control and Heterosexual Possibilities In addition to hypnotic and hormonal treatments, the early twentieth century witnessed increased debate about contraceptive technologies, especially for women. This was despite the fact that birth control was considered an ‘obscene’ topic that could be censored under laws like the 1857 Obscene Publications Act in the UK or the 1873 Comstock Act in the US. Birth control advocates like Stopes and her American counterpart, Margaret Sanger, promoted female birth-control technologies like the cervical cap, coitus interruptus or spermicides. They argued that only reliable birth control could free women from the physical and economical ‘strain’ of successive births and ensure the health and happiness of the married couple (Stopes 1918: 89). This concern with individual reproductive rights and needs was underpinned by the eugenic belief that birth control would also serve to protect the health of the nation, ‘race’ and ‘Empire’ by preventing the birth of ‘unfit weaklings and diseased individuals’ (Stopes 1919: 7). These quotes, which are characteristic of Stopes’s rhetoric, demonstrate that the feminist ambitions of birth control movements led by white women tended to exclude people who did not fit eugenic standards as defined by ableist, classist, colonial, heteronormative and racist ideologies. As Aimee Armande Wilson has shown, birth control activism and literary modernism need to be understood as mutually co-constitutive and influencing movements. Birth-control rhetoric presented a fundamentally divided human subject that was at the mercy of biological processes and external forces, which technology and science

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promised to control (Wilson 2016: 12). Some modernist authors embraced the possibilities of birth control to liberate the individual from these pressures. Woolf, for instance, as already mentioned above, indicates in A Room of One’s Own that contraception would play an important role in allowing women to think and write. Woolf also foregrounds the stifling effects of uncontrollable reproduction on creativity in Orlando, suggesting that ‘the strand of the modernist movement focused on the life of the mind is due in part to the increasing availability of birth control’ (Wilson 2016: 72). Contraceptive technologies allow Orlando to control biological reproduction and turn attention to the production of literary works that are expressive of the modern spirit. They also make it possible for Orlando and husband Shelmerdine to cocreate a modern marriage that is no longer restrained by Victorian marital expectations. In contrast to Orlando, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) demonstrates that birth control was not an uncomplicated technology of liberation for all women. The bleak ending of the novel exposes the stifling impact of uncontrollable reproduction on women: Larsen’s protagonist, Helga Crane, slowly dies because of the seemingly endless cycles of repeated childbirth. This is despite the fact that, earlier in the book, Crane explicitly resists the eugenicist sentiments expressed by her former fiancé, James Vayle, who insists that it is her duty, as a Black woman ‘of the better class’, to secure the future of ‘the race’ through reproduction with an equally ‘fit’ partner (Larsen 1969: 231–2). As Daylanne K. English has demonstrated, Vayle represents the eugenic Black bourgeois uplift politics that were articulated by leading thinkers like W. E. B. DuBois and E. Franklin Frazier, and that existed alongside mainstream eugenic movements targeting white women (English 2004: 55–9). Larsen was highly critical of eugenic thought and used her fiction to expose and challenge eugenic ideologies (English 2004: 133–6; Macharia 2011; Schalk 2015). In Quicksand, Crane resists the eugenic pressures placed on Black women, initially, by refusing to reproduce at all and, later, by reproducing in ways that would be considered ‘irresponsible’ within a eugenic framework: she knows very little about her husband and endangers her own health and that of her increasingly ‘sickly’ children by reproducing ‘too much’ (Larsen: 1969: 283). It is precisely through her refusal to reproduce ‘well’ or ‘responsibly’ – for instance, by accessing contraceptive technologies – that Crane resists eugenic ideologies, even if this comes at the cost of her own unravelling as a subject. White male modernist authors like D. H. Lawrence felt ambivalent about birth control for other reasons. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), as part of his wider ‘attack on technologization’ (Goody 2011: 33), Lawrence presents birth control as one of many modern technologies that society needs to reject to return to a more natural state of living in connection with the body and other people. Early on in the novel, Connie, her upper-class husband and their educated friends debate a ‘future, when babies would be bred in bottles and women would be “immunised”’ (Lawrence 2006: 74). An enthusiastic female friend explains that these new technological interventions can bring about an emancipated future in which ‘a woman can live her own life’ without being ‘dragged down by her functions’ (Lawrence 2006: 74). Within the logic of the novel, artificial reproduction and birth control are part of a dystopian vision that Lawrence’s readers are meant to reject. Indeed, Connie discovers strong maternal desires through her extra-marital relationship with Mellors. Although the couple discusses birth control briefly (Lawrence 2006: 168–9), neither of them uses contraception, and Connie is pregnant with Mellors’s child at

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the end of the book. Mellors’s much more ambivalent attitude towards reproduction complicates the novel’s overt technophobic dismissal of birth control, however. This is indicative of Lawrence’s wider anxieties about procreative sex and pregnancy. He feared that the focus on biological reproduction and children could prevent heterosexual individuals from truly connecting with each other and stop them from experiencing the transformative power of sex (Bond 2016). As Lawrence explains in his Study of Thomas Hardy, ‘the sexual act [. . .] is not for the depositing of seed. It is for leaping off into the unknown’ (Lawrence 1985: 53). Similarly, Mellors stresses in Lady Chatterley’s Lover that sex is ‘a creative act that is far more than procreative’ (Lawrence 2006: 279). This exploration of non-procreative sexual intimacy between men and women was part of a broader rearticulation of heterosexual erotics in the modernist period that was partially enabled by the availability of more reliable forms of birth control, as well as increased public debate around their use. Even though Lawrence criticised Stopes for being ‘wise and scientific’ about sex (Lawrence 2004: 247), the way in which he wrote about heterosexual intimacy on its own terms instead of as a means to have children shares important similarities with Stopes’s Married Love. Like Stopes, Lawrence uses rhythmic language and repetition to try to depict the bodily and mental sensations his characters experience during sex rather than focusing on the reproductive futures such acts might engender. In terms of content and style, Lawrence’s work was thus part of broader technologically enabled attempts to reimagine love, intimacy and sex between men and women. For Lawrence, the goal was not to discipline the body and its desires, but to enable what he called the ‘leap into the unknown’, the fusion of two embodied selves that, he believed, could remake the individual and the modern world. As this chapter has shown, techno-scientific interventions inspired diverse responses from literary modernist authors. Some celebrated the emancipatory and empowering dimensions of technological innovations that promised to make the body and its desires and functions subject to rational human control. Others were cautious and critical of the ways in which technologies could be marshalled in harmful ways, for instance, when used for eugenic purposes. What the literary authors and sexual scientists discussed in this chapter have in common – despite their many differences – is an understanding of bodily sex and sexuality as deeply entangled with techno-scientific frameworks. In addition, many of them shared an appreciation of the fact that modern science and technology often failed to control and contain, but rather made it possible to imagine the open-ended and as yet unknowable possibilities of bodies and desires.

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Bauer, Heike (2009), English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion, 1860–1930. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bland, Lucy and Laura Doan, eds (1998), Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bond, Candis (2016), ‘Embodied Love: D. H. Lawrence, Modernity and Pregnancy’, The D. H. Lawrence Review, 41: 1, pp. 21–44. Brush, S. G. (1978), ‘Nettie M. Stevens and the Discovery of Sex Determination by Chromosomes’, Isis, 69: 2, pp. 162–72. Caughie, P. L. (2013), ‘The Temporality of Modernist Life Writing in the Era of Transsexualism: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Einar Wegener’s Man into Woman’, Modern Fiction Studies, 59: 3, pp. 501–25. Childs, D. J. (2001), Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cook, Hera (2004), The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception 1800–1975. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Corelli, Marie (1918), The Young Diana: An Experiment with the Future. New York: George H. Doran Company. Doan, Laura (2007), ‘“Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself”: The Queer Navigational Systems of Radclyffe Hall’, English Language Notes, 45: 2, pp. 9–22. Ellis, Havelock and John Addington Symonds (2008), Sexual Inversion: A Critical Edition, ed. I. Crozier. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. English, D. K. (2004), Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Forel, August (1906), Hypnotism, or Suggestion and Psychotherapy. London: Rebman. Forster, E. M. (2005), Maurice. London: Penguin. Foucault, Michel (1990), The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge. London: Vintage. Freud, Sigmund (2001), ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume 18, ed. J. Strachey. London: Vintage, pp. 67–144. Funke, Jana (2013), ‘“We Cannot Be Greek Now”: Age Difference, Corruption of Youth and the Making of Sexual Inversion’, English Studies, 94: 2, pp. 139–53. Funke, Jana and K. Fisher (2019), ‘The Age of Attraction: Age, Gender and the History of Modern Male Homosexuality’, Gender & History, 31: 2, pp. 266–83. Gaedtke, Andrew (2008), ‘From Transmissions of Madness to Machines of Writing: Mina Loy’s Insel as Clinical Fantasy’, Journal of Modern Literature, 32: 1, pp. 143–62. Gill-Peterson, Jules (2018), Histories of the Transgender Child. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Goldschmidt, Richard (1917), ‘Intersexuality and the Endocrine Aspect of Sex’, Endocrinology: The Bulletin of the Association for the Study of the Internal Secretions, 1, pp. 433–56. Goody, Alex (2011), Technology, Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hall, Radclyffe (2016), The World and Other Unpublished Works by Radclyffe Hall, ed. J. Funke. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hallim, Robyn (2002), Marie Corelli: Science, Society and the Best Seller, PhD Thesis, University of Sydney. Hausman, B. L. (2006), Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Heaney, Emma (2017), The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Jensen, R. E. (2015), ‘Improving Upon Nature: The Rhetorical Ecology of Chemical Language, Reproductive Endocrinology, and the Medicalization of Infertility’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 101: 2, pp. 329–53.

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Kahan, Benjamin (2013), ‘Queer Modernism’, in A Handbook of Modernist Studies, ed. J.-M. Rabaté. Chichester: Wiley, pp. 347–62. Kahan, Benjamin (2019), The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Koerber, Amy (2018), From Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhetorical History. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press. Larsen, Nella (1969), Quicksand. New York: Negro Universities Press. Lawrence, D. H. (1985), Study of Thomas Hardy, ed. B. Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, D. H. (2004), ‘Pornography and Obscenity’, in Late Essays and Articles, ed. J. T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 233–53. Lawrence, D. H. (2006), Lady Chatterley’s Lover. London: Penguin. Leng, Kirsten (2018), Sexual Politics and Feminist Science: Women Sexologists in Germany, 1900–1933. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Linge, Ina (2021), ‘The Potency of the Butterfly: The Reception of Richard B. Goldschmidt’s Animal Experiments in German Sexology around 1920’, History of the Human Sciences, 34: 1, pp. 1–31. Loy, Mina (1991), Insel. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press. Macharia, Keguro (2011), ‘Queering Helga Crane: Black Nativism in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand’, Modern Fiction Studies, 57: 2, pp. 254–75. Medd, Jodie (2012), Lesbian Scandal and the Culture of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meyer, Sabine (2015), ‘Wie Lili zu einem richtigen Mädchen wurde’: Lili Elbe - zur Konstruktion von Geschlecht und Identität zwischen Medialisierung, Regulierung und Subjektivierung. Bielefeld: Transcript. Moll, Albert (1921), Behandlung der Homosexualität: Biochemisch oder Psychisch? Bonn: Marcus and Webers. Peppis, Paul (2014), Sciences of Modernism: Ethnography, Sexology, and Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Richmond, M. L. (2007), ‘The Cell as the Basis for Heredity, Development, and Evolution: Richard Goldschmidt’s Program of Physiological Genetics’, in From Embryology to EvoDevo: A History of Developmental Evolution, ed. M. D. Laubichler and J. Maienschein. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 169–211. Rohy, Valerie (2015), Lost Causes : Narrative, Etiology, and Queer Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schaffner, A. K. (2011), Modernism and Perversion: Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature, 1850–1930, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Schalk, Sami (2015), ‘Transing: Resistance to Eugenic Ideology in Nella Larsen’s Passing’, Journal of Modern Literature, 38: 3, pp. 148–61. Schrenck-Notzing, Albert von (1895), Therapeutic Suggestion in Psychopathia Sexualis: Pathological Manifestations of the Sexual Sense, with Especial Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct. Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Company. Sengoopta, Chandak (2006), The Most Secret Quintessence of Life: Sex, Glands, and Hormones 1850–1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stark, J. F. (2020), The Cult of Youth: Anti-Ageing in Modern Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Starling, E. H. (1905), The Croonian Lectures on the Chemical Correlation of the Functions of the Body: Delivered Before the Royal College of Physicians of London. London: publisher not identified. Stopes, Marie (1918), Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties. London: A. C. Fifield.

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Stopes, Marie (1919), Wise Parenthood: A Sequel to ‘Married Love’. London: A. C. Fifield. Thurschwell, Pamela (2001), Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turda, Marius (2010), Modernism and Eugenics. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Wilson, A. A. (2016), Conceived in Modernism: The Aesthetics and Politics of Birth Control. London: Bloomsbury. Wolffram, Heather (2009), The Stepchildren of Science: Psychical Research and Parapsychology in Germany, c. 1870–1939. Amsterdam: Brill Rodopi. Woolf, Virginia (2001), A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. London: Vintage. Woolf, Virginia (2008), Orlando. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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18 Race: Fordism, Factories and the Mechanical Reproduction of Racial Identity Joshua Lam

T

oward the end of the nineteenth century, understandings of the human body underwent a radical revision. With the advent of new medical technologies that could perceive corporeal interiors, such as the ophthalmoscope (1847) and the X-ray (1895), bodies became subject to new regimes of perception. Scientists began to view the body in terms of thermodynamics, and Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management sought to economise physical labour, while inventions such as the typewriter (1873), phonograph (1877) and cinema (1891) began to incorporate bodies into new media environments. As the techniques of mass production formalised by Henry Ford spread across the globe, the manufacture of new technologies of mobility like the car and the aeroplane produced a more interconnected world. Each of these phenomena participated in the recasting of racial relations and ideologies: the X-ray, for example, was used for ‘epilation’ (cosmetic hair removal) to clear ‘dark shadow[s]’ from ambiguous skin colour, participating in the technological ‘refashioning of white racial identity’ (Herzig 2005: 162–3). New media pluralised methods of bodily and cultural transmission, from the commercialisation of recorded African American music (‘race records’) in the interwar period to ethnographic sound recordings and cinematic depictions of the body. Taylorism depended upon implicit beliefs about racial and national aptitudes; Fordism utilised neo-colonial theories of ‘race development’. Despite these confluences, scholars now recognise that, as Bruce Sinclair notes, ‘The history of race in America has been written as if technologies scarcely existed, and the history of technology as if it were utterly innocent of racial significance’ (2004: 1). Although scholars like Rayvon Fouché (2005) and Alondra Nelson (2002), and fields including Afrofuturism, have gone to great lengths to address such gaps, modernist studies has produced little comparable work.1 Pioneering studies of modernism and technology by Tim Armstrong (1998) and Sara Danius (2002), for example, make few references to race or racial identity, despite their investment in the ‘socially constructed’ meanings and perceptions of the body (Armstrong 1998: 4). This is one symptom of what Michael Bibby calls the ‘racial formation of modernist studies’, which ‘overwhelmingly focuses on white authors’, even as the ‘new modernist studies’ have sought to produce a more inclusive field (2013: 486). The fact that technophilic modernist movements like F. T. Marinetti’s Futurism persistently construed Africa and Africans as representing ‘nature, the primitive, and the pretechnological’ also helps to explain the persistence of the ‘reified binary between blackness and technology’ (Chude-Sokei 2016: 31;

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Nelson 2002: 6). As Marianna Torgovnick (1990), Michael North (1994) and Hal Foster (2004) have shown, the ‘primitive’ became one of modernism’s primary fetishes, along with the machine to which it was ostensibly opposed. Yet as Nelson notes, African American thought has produced ‘over a century’s worth’ of critical ‘tools’ that challenge such oppositions, beginning with W. E. B. Du Bois (2002: 3). If scholars have not yet turned sustained attention to intersections of race and technology in modernist literature, it is not for a lack of material. In the US context alone, a brief glance at Black modernist writers reveals numerous engagements and opportunities for study. In addition to protesting against the social and legal injustices of Jim Crow that regulated so many aspects of their bodies and lives (including access to social space, employment, medical treatment and geographic mobility), Black modernist writers also viewed their bodies, and their texts, in technological terms. Consider, for example, Jean Toomer’s celebration of a ‘machine aesthetic’ that sought to remake the image of the perfectible body (Whalan 2002: 464). Consider futuristic inventions like the ‘megascope’ in Du Bois’s ‘The Princess Steel’, which features a posthuman African princess with hair of steel; consider George Schuyler’s satirical Black No More, which revolves around a ‘formidable apparatus of sparkling nickel’ that transforms skin from Black to white (1999 [1931]: 16). Zora Neale Hurston’s œuvre, too, is dependent upon the machines she used to collect her folklore, including her automobile, ‘Sassie Susie’, and the acetate discs upon which she recorded folk songs, sermons and children’s games (Brooks 2010). The language of mechanisation also pervades Claude McKay’s novels, which despair at ‘the super-mechanical Anglo-Saxon-controlled world’ (1929: 325); Richard Wright’s accounts of the Great Migration and urbanisation; and Ralph Ellison’s masterpiece, Invisible Man (1952). Though none of these works has been ignored by scholars – many are canonical works of African American, if not modernist, literature – the lack of sustained scholarly attention to the intersection of race and technology in modernist studies is indicative of the work left to be done. In the US context, the year 1903 serves as a fitting moment to consider the coconstitution of race and technology. As Elizabeth D. Esch observes, Henry Ford incorporated the Ford Motor Company during the same year that Du Bois declared the problem of the twentieth century to be ‘the problem of the color line’ (Du Bois 1999: 17). In subsequent decades, Ford’s Model-T would become the best-selling automobile in the world, just as his company’s pioneering techniques of mechanised mass production spread across the globe. These practices were so influential that Ford’s name has come to characterise the modernist era itself. Marxist thinkers, in particular, have regarded Fordism as the mode of production governing the modernist era (Jameson 1991; Harvey 1989, 1990). As Michael Denning puts it, ‘modernism itself might be understood as the culture of Fordism’ (1997: 28). Ford’s products and manufacturing techniques were distributed, like virtually all technologies – and like modernism – unevenly. As Esch notes, the uneven development of Fordism allowed the company to employ ‘the color line’ in varied and flexible ways, even as it consistently used ‘white supremacist ideas and racial segregationist practices’ across the globe, from Detroit and the Southern US to Brazil, South Africa and Nazi Germany (Esch 2018: 1). In addition to pioneering a mode of industrial production, Ford’s company was also committed (since 1914) to ‘making men’ (1). The formidable combination of Ford’s mass production and the company’s cultural endeavours, such

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as the five-dollar day and the Ford English School, prompted Antonio Gramsci to identify Fordism with ‘Americanism’, claiming that ‘Hegemony here is born in the factory’ (1988: 278). Through the regulation of its employees’ homes and social lives, including their marital status, languages, clothing, leisure and more, Ford sought to produce not just cars, but also consumers who would purchase them. Although Ford’s boast of ‘making men’ is typically understood in terms of his desire to expand his base of consumers, his company was also engaged in what Roediger and Esch (2012, 2017) have called ‘race management’, a set of practices that used racial beliefs to structure labour relations. Developing this insight, this chapter will turn to the site of the factory in modernist literature, surveying the ways in which writers such as Aldous Huxley, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison have deployed the fictional factory to scrutinise the technological mediation of class and race relations. As the complex literary depictions of the factory by each of these writers shows, Fordism did more than merely use race to manage labour. Indeed, the company and its followers used new systems of industrial organisation, scientific management and racial ideologies actively to produce the racial categories we have come to recognise as modern.

The Factory and the World The prospect of humanity’s subordination to a technologised world disturbed many modernist writers, particularly during the economic and cultural crises of the 1930s. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), for example, imagines a dystopian society structured according to Fordist principles. Set in the year A.F. 632 (After Ford), the novel depicts a planet ruled by a World State that has chosen 1908, the year the Model-T was first produced, as the first ‘Year of Our Ford’. Anticipating later scientific innovations such as in vitro fertilisation and cloning, the novel’s society is founded upon the ‘principle of mass production at last applied to biology’ (1932: 7). New members of society are mass manufactured on an assembly line via extracted ovaries in an enormous ‘hatchery’, where the ‘Bokanovsky Process’ makes one egg produce nearly 100 identical individuals. Explicitly linking industrial production with reproduction, this process is geared towards principles of efficient labour: ‘The whole of a small factory [is] staffed with the products of a single bokanovskified egg’ (7). Above all, the novel warns against the submission of humankind to mechanisation. As Huxley declaimed elsewhere: Fordism demands that we should sacrifice the animal man . . . not indeed to God, but to the Machine. There is no place in the factory, or in that larger factory which is the modern industrialized world, for . . . artists, mystics, or even, finally, individuals. (1931: 180) By extrapolating Fordist principles to its dystopian society, the novel envisions a world where a ‘philosophy of industrialism’ conspires with eugenics and Pavlovian conditioning to produce indistinct masses rather than individuals (180). The disturbing promise of Fordism, for Huxley, is that all distinctions between the factory and the world will collapse. Underneath this familiar dystopian image lurks a less familiar aspect of Fordism: the production of rigid caste divisions formalised via segregated housing, transportation

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and colour-coded uniforms. Houses and helicopters are reserved for the upper castes, barracks and a monorail for the lower; Alphas wear grey, Epsilons wear black. The caste divisions are implicitly racial and explicitly eugenic: Alpha and Beta characters are white or unmarked, and most lower-caste figures fit the mould of racial stereotypes, from a pair of ‘small, black and hideous’ Delta attendants to an ‘Epsilon-Plus Negro porter’ (Huxley 1932: 64, 101). Racial stereotypes of fertility and sexuality are also present: ‘You should see the way a negro ovary responds to pituitary!,’ the Director of Hatcheries declares: ‘It’s quite astonishing, when you’re used to working with European material’ (9). Unlike his satirical approach to Fordism, Huxley does not mock such stereotypes; critics have noted that the author ‘openly favoured caste-based social models’ and supported eugenic theories at this time (Waddell 2016: 33; Greenberg 2016: 113). Beyond the implicit racism and colourism of Brave New World, Huxley’s nightmarish portrayal of Fordist rationalisation is aptly (if unconsciously) linked to contemporaneous notions of ‘race’ in two fundamental ways. First, through eugenics, Huxley’s Fordist society renders ‘eternal and biological’ not just the ‘system of class relationships’, as Theodor Adorno observes, but also the implicit racial hierarchies that intersect with that system (1967: 100). Applying mass production to biological reproduction, the World State mechanically reproduces the character of race relations governing Huxley’s present: white supremacy and a racially coded caste system. With the addition of Pavlovian conditioning, through which individuals are taught to enjoy their social position and fear all others, this rationalised but unequal society is able to reproduce itself by literalising what Walter Lippmann famously called ‘the manufacture of consent’ (1941 [1922]: 248). Second, the correlation between specific races and castes is governed by Fordist principles of labour and efficiency. Specific racial and ethnic groups are selected for specific tasks in Huxley’s society. Beyond the assignation of jobs like ‘porter’ and ‘attendant’ for dark-skinned individuals, the systematised nature of race-based roles, assigned at birth, is most visible in a scene where an outsider, John the Savage, visits one of the World State’s factories in London. ‘Each process,’ explained the Human Element Manager, ‘is carried out, so far as possible, by a single Bokanovsky Group.’ And, in effect, eighty-three almost noseless black brachycephalic Deltas were cold-pressing. The fifty-six four-spindle chucking and turning machines were being manipulated by fifty-six aquiline and ginger Gammas. One hundred and seven heat-conditioned Epsilon Senegalese were working in the foundry. (159) Numerous other ‘Bokanovsky’ groups, characterised by caste and physiognomy, follow this list, each connected with a specific function in the factory. With labourers bred for specific types of (dis)ability and conditioned for specific work environments, eugenics works in tandem with race management to realise Ford’s doctrine of continuous improvement on a mass scale. Though Huxley’s dystopian vision projects far into the future, Brave New World captures several aspects of the Fordist ethos with striking accuracy. In his writings and public comments, Henry Ford frequently touted his utopian pretensions. His My Life and Work, for example, imagines what ‘will happen when this world is put on a production basis’ (1922: 79). Throughout the book, Ford seeks to extend his

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manufacturing and managerial principles to ‘the largest application – . . . they have nothing peculiarly to do with motor cars or tractors but form something in the nature of a universal code’ (3). At the same time, scholars have shown that the universalist principles promoted by Henry Ford were at odds with his company’s varied application of what Esch calls ‘racial knowledge’ (Meyer 1981; Esch 2018). Though the Ford Motor Company has been viewed as progressive for hiring large numbers of Black workers at its River Rouge complex in the 1920s, two decades before most car manufacturers, this specific policy (exceptional among other Ford factories) masks the company’s deeper inequities. As Esch demonstrates, this hiring policy existed alongside the notorious anti-Semitism of Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent and public support for eugenics; company hiring practices that routed Black workers into the most dangerous jobs; colonial practices that exploited racial hierarchies in Brazil and South Africa; assimilationist practices of ‘race development’ that sought to whiten European immigrants; and a belief in ‘white managerialism’ that drew upon so-called ‘racial knowledge’ pioneered in Southern US plantation slavery (2018: 2, 9). It is for many of these reasons that the radical journalist George Seldes declared in 1943, ‘The Ford Empire is the Hitler Nazi Empire on a small scale’ (1943: 138). If the Ford factory became a ‘repressive state in miniature’, acting as an inspiration and even a model for ‘management-as-social-control among fascists’ like Hitler and Mussolini (Esch 2018: 52), Brave New World anticipates these developments by amplifying the company’s racial capitalism to the level of the World State. Indeed, many of the company’s racial practices are echoed in Huxley’s World State, which is also a colonial empire; it appears to have achieved world domination, with the exception of a few ‘Savage Reservations’, which remain unconquered only because they are not ‘worth the expense of civilizing’ (Huxley 1932: 162). Taking Fordism as his model for world-wide technocracy, Huxley’s Brave New World thus stands as a reminder that US industrialism has long been explicitly linked with practices of racial exploitation and colonisation.

The Mechanical Production of Racial Optics While Huxley’s novel offers the best-known fictional representation of Fordist principles extended to a global scale, Black modernist writers also turned to the site of the factory to index how deeply racial ideologies were inscribed upon class relations. As the mechanised assembly line came under greater scrutiny in the 1930s for its dehumanising qualities, epitomised by the slapstick antics of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), novelists Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison sought to reveal the uneven impacts of these degradations. In key scenes from Wright’s memoir Black Boy (1945), his novel Lawd Today! (1963) and Ellison’s Invisible Man, the factory emerges as a space where prohibition of industrial education for Black workers coexists alongside the exploitation of their physical labour; where surveillance intended to promote industrial efficiency operates according to a racial optics; and where whiteness is accorded a managerial function that defines itself in terms of technological proficiency and racial knowledge. In short, for Wright and Ellison, the factory becomes a site where race relations are manufactured every bit as much as the objects and commodities it produces. Wright recounts one such site in his memoir. As a teenager in Jackson, Mississippi, Richard gains employment with the American Optical Company, ‘a tiny factory filled

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with many strange machines smeared with red dust’ (1945: 187).2 The factory initially operates as a site of promise that will help him earn enough money to leave the South and ‘learn a trade’ (186). Viewing industrial education as a means to upward economic and geographic mobility, the factory initially symbolises the prospects of the North. Soon, however, Richard learns a lesson of a different sort. Despite the intent of the manager, a ‘Yankee’, to ‘train a Negro boy in the optical trade . . . to help him, guide him’, the two white men instructed to ‘break [Richard] in’ and teach him about ‘the mechanics of grinding and polishing lenses’ refuse to do so (187). After a month of sweeping floors and watching the intractable white men work in silence, he is told by one of them, ‘This is white man’s work around here’ (188). Facing weeks of intimidation, open hostility and death threats, Richard soon realises he ‘would never learn to operate those machines as long as those two white men in there stood by them’ (192). Despite the sympathy of his employer, Richard leaves the job, fearing for his life. Wright’s account of oppression in the optical factory offers a compact lesson in technologically mediated race relations. As the white men jealously guard their trade and their machines, they enact a widespread process that Ronald Takaki (2000) and Michael Adas (1989) have described: the identification of white, Anglo-Saxon, US masculinity with technological ingenuity, and the use of technology to subordinate women and minority populations, who were often construed as incapable of achieving technological competence. Despite the popularity in the South of accommodationist positions like Booker T. Washington’s, which advocated for industrial education and trade training instead of higher education for Southern Black workers, even basic access to technical training was often refused to Black Americans, who were restricted instead to manual or deskilled (not ‘unskilled’) labour. As Wright noted in 12 Million Black Voices, his impressionistic work of photo-journalism narrativising the Great Migration, ‘The Bosses of the Buildings decree that we must be maids, porters, janitors, cooks, and general servants’ (1941: 102–3). Beyond these labour inequities, Black Boy also demonstrates how uneven technological development across racial lines helps to enforce geographical segregation. Wright frames his experience at the optical factory by prefacing it with two violent racist encounters that juxtapose the discreet mobility of the bicycle with the (white) power of the car. In the first, Richard returns from a delivery in the suburbs with a punctured bicycle tyre. A group of young white men offer him a lift on the running board of their car, but they soon assault him and throw him from the vehicle for neglecting to say ‘sir’ to one of the passengers. A second encounter shows Richard making a bicycle delivery in a white neighbourhood, only to be ‘jammed . . . into the curbing’ by a police car; he is violently searched at gunpoint, then warned not to enter white neighbourhoods at night (181). In each case, cars are used to keep Richard ‘in his place’ socially and geographically, just as white managerialism at the factory does so in terms of economics and employment. The threat of physical violence that precedes and pervades Richard’s experience at the optical factory is one component of white supremacist terrorism that seeks to regulate his and other Black Americans’ access to technical education and employment (among other social privileges). Another component, hinted at in the name of the company, is rendered on a more figurative level. As Mikko Tuhkanen suggests, Wright’s discussion of ‘the optical trade’ also marks a Foucauldian shift from spectacles of punishment towards forms of racial violence that depended upon ‘a more

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economically disseminated disciplinary regime’ (2009: 110). Chief among the latter is a form of self-surveillance that Wright construes in visual terms. As Richard struggles to ‘see’ why he continues to be fired from low-paying jobs, he devotes increasing effort to scrutinising his own behaviour. ‘White people make it their business to watch niggers,’ his friend Griggs explains to him. ‘And they pass the word around. . . . You’re marked already’ (1945: 183). The irony of Richard’s inability to ‘see’ the racial optics governing Jim Crow while employed in an optical factory will not be lost on readers. Black Boy portrays an internalised form of surveillance that replicates the type of managerial oversight practised in Ford’s factories. In the 1920s, particularly in the River Rouge complex, where large numbers of African Americans were employed, the Ford Motor Company ‘pioneered new levels of surveillance, segregation, repression, and fraternalism, all under the umbrella of the exaltation of managerial leadership’ (Esch 2018: 52). Extending managerial oversight beyond the factory and into the home through the company’s infamous Sociological Department, Black workers at Ford were ‘particularly surveilled’ (91). In his memoir, Wright’s emphasis on ‘disembodied surveillance’ mirrors what Tuhkanen calls ‘the panoptic regime’s superior efficacy over the spectacle of punishment in ensuring subjection’ (2009: 108–9). Wright’s account of the optical factory demonstrates precisely how the remote threat of violence undergirds a discipline that coerces Black subjects to watch themselves. Even when his paternalistic ‘Yankee’ employer, Mr Crane, asks Richard to explain how the white machinists have mistreated him, Crane continually reminds him: ‘Keep control of yourself. No matter what happens, keep control . . .’ (192). In the wake of his termination, Richard tries to instil this lesson in himself. However, the pervasive threat of violence thwarts his attempts to naturalise a docile, servile manner. Though Richard goes to work ‘resolving to watch [his] every move’, this self-surveillance paralyses him; he forgets tasks, drops items and freezes when white customers address him (195). In such instances, Richard’s expectation of violence obstructs his efficiency as a worker. If the point of panoptic discipline is ‘to induce in the [subject] a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power’ (Foucault 1977: 201), Richard’s failure to internalise social codes mandated by his employer and, simultaneously, to work efficiently dramatises a tension between the imperatives of racial subjection and productive labour. In casting himself as the melancholy individual who remains heroically maladapted to harmful social expectations, Wright emphasises the struggle of the individual against mass society in a manner that parallels Huxley’s Brave New World and many other modernist texts. Though its status as memoir demands a localised attention that contrasts with Huxley’s fantastical extension of Fordism to a global scale, Black Boy also emphasises the systematic and disciplinary nature of racial inequality. Reflecting upon his time at the American Optical Company, Wright declares that the white workers who tormented him ‘did not seem to be individual men, but part of a huge, implacable, elemental design toward which hate was futile’ (194). Much as Richard’s body continually rejects his attempts to incorporate racist social codes, Wright’s memoir consistently throws off the notion that racism exists solely in the conscious hatred of prejudiced individuals. Instead, Black Boy dramatises the systematic and manufactured nature of such inequities as they are encoded in relations of management and production.

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Race Management and the Technological Reproduction of Whiteness Wright’s autobiographical observations about racial optics and social automatism, grounded in the site of the factory, are uncannily echoed in a key scene from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. During his brief employment at the Liberty Paint Company, Ellison’s narrator begins to learn how to produce the company’s most successful paint, ‘Optic White’. Described by one employee as ‘the purest white that can be found’, the paint and the company use the barely coded language of white supremacy (1980: 201–2). A ‘huge electric sign’ (196) outside the plant makes this abundantly clear: KEEP AMERICA PURE WITH LIBERTY PAINTS As Harryette Mullen notes, this episode of Ellison’s novel offers an ‘astute parable of the production of whiteness’ by using ‘technological metaphors of production’ (2012: 134, 138). Working under a white supervisor named Kimbro, the narrator is asked to use a device like ‘a battery hydrometer’ to put ten drops of ‘dead black’ liquid into each bucket of ‘Optic White’ (Ellison 1980: 200). Though the drops spread upon the surface and ‘become blacker still, spreading suddenly out to the edges’, Kimbro emphasises the mindless nature of the task: ‘You just do what you’re told and don’t try to think about it’ (200). Eventually, the black liquid disappears, rendering a white paint ‘that’ll cover just about anything’ (202). In this evocative image, the production of whiteness itself depends upon the concealment of Black labour, Black materials and Black death (‘dead black[s]’); it is a product that elides its miscegenated origins, even as it seeks to cover ‘just about anything’ with a supreme shade of white. The invisibility of Black contributions to the formation of an implicitly white US culture, and to industrialisation, is taken one step further when Ellison’s narrator is sent to the plant’s basement to work under Lucius Brockway, an elderly Black worker in charge of many mysterious machines. Though he lacks technical education, Brockway functions as an unofficial engineer. Wary of racial competition, he recounts with glee his ousting of an ‘Italian fellow’, ‘one of them so-called engineers’, whose official training could not compete with Brockway’s extensive experience: A fool! He wanted to boss me and I know more about this basement than anybody, boilers and everything. . . . I knows the location of each and every pipe and switch and cable and wire and everything else. . . . I got it in my head so good I can trace it out on paper down to the last nut and bolt; and ain’t never been to nobody’s engineering school neither. (215–16) Brockway also participates in the company’s marketing; he produces the company’s slogan, ‘If It’s Optic White, It’s the Right White,’ for which he receives a $300 bonus. He brags to the narrator: ‘We make the best white paint in the world . . . Our white is so white you can paint a chunka coal and you’d have to crack it open with a sledge hammer to prove it wasn’t white clear through!’ (217). Brockway thus hyphenates the roles of an Uncle Tom and a trickster. He dissembles before his white employers

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(as Richard in Black Boy could not) and exploits the paternalism of the company’s owner, ‘the Old Man’, for his own benefit; yet he is also complicit with the company’s racist rhetoric and is eager to remain in his exploited position. The exploitation of Black labour and its implication in the industrial production of whiteness are made especially clear in one of Brockway’s formulations: ‘They got all this machinery, but that ain’t everything; we the machines inside the machine’ (217). As he elaborates, it is his own concealed labour that produces ‘Optic White’ and keeps the machines running. They thinks ’cause everything down here is done by machinery, that’s all there is to it. They crazy! Ain’t a continental thing that happens down here that ain’t as iffen I done put my black hands into it! Them machines just do the cooking, these here hands right here do the sweeting. Yes, sir! Lucius Brockway hit it square on the head! I dips my finger in and sweets it! (218) Brockway’s claim to technical skill, despite his relative invisibility, fits into a larger trend in twentieth-century US modernity: the attempt to prove and perform masculinity through technological mastery. Mullen identifies this as ‘the black man’s potential assimilation/mastery through technological rather than reproductive power’, an attempt that is limited by Brockway’s feminised status as a ‘cook’, which prevents him from acquiring social and economic power (2012: 139). More broadly, such factory scenes highlight how historical shifts in gender roles have been inscribed in mechanical labour. Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (2009 [1959]), for example, compares the traditionally feminine work of cooking with one character’s mastery at an ‘old-fashioned lathe’ resembling ‘an oversize cookstove’ in a munitions factory during the Second World War (84). As the young protagonist, Selina, witnesses her Barbadian mother, Silla, at work, she views her mother’s movements, ‘attuned to the mechanical rhythms of the machine-mass’, as evidence of Silla’s ‘formidable force’ (84). Observing ‘the same transient calm’ Silla emits when cooking, Selina feels her mother ‘was like the machines, some larger form of life with an awesome beauty all her own’ (85). In a plot that pits the mother’s desire to remain in Brooklyn against the father’s dream of returning to Barbados, the mother’s mechanisation underscores how industrial capitalism forcefully assimilates racial and national difference, while also hinting at the economic empowerment that accompanied the mass employment of women during the Second World War. As with Ellison’s Brockway, feminised domestic labour is mapped onto the traditionally masculine space of the factory in order to signal shifting hierarchies of race, class and gender, even as each scene acknowledges the technical skills necessary for domestic and industrial labour alike. Brockway’s unofficial status and obscure placement in the factory basement also make him a kind of antecedent for Ellison’s unnamed narrator, who will eventually become another ‘invisible man’, living in a ‘hole in [a] basement’ that he has ‘wired’ with 1,369 lights, using stolen electrical current from ‘Monopolated Light & Power’ (3, 7). Both characters push against the myth of Black resistance to technology, even as they demonstrate how subversive the notion of Black technical mastery is to a society that affiliates technological expertise, and the figure of the engineer, with white masculinity. Ellison’s depiction of these technologically adept Black men is evidence of what Jennifer L. Lieberman calls his ‘technological humanism’, a position that resists

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the notion that ‘new inventions will [necessarily] liberate or harm people’ (2017: 172). Instead of maintaining simplistic associations between social and technological progress, Ellison reminds readers that technologies are fundamentally ambiguous, and that they are, in Lieberman’s words, ‘shaped by the institutions and powers that control them’ (172). While Wright’s memoir portrays the disciplinary implications of racial optics in a small factory setting, Ellison’s Invisible Man further engages large-scale institutions typified by the Ford Motor Company: the Liberty Paint Company ‘looks like a small city’ (197). As with Seldes’s analogy between the Ford and Nazi empires, Ellison turns to the site of the factory to emblematise a widespread form of techno-scientific control. This is most apparent in an episode following the protagonist’s encounter with Brockway. After a mechanical explosion in the basement of the paint factory, the protagonist is admitted to a ‘factory hospital’, where doctors administer X-rays and electric shocks while discussing him in psychological, sociological, medical and racial terms (243). As Scott Selisker notes, Ellison ‘combines institutions as a strategy for underlining their similarities and pervasive control over U.S. culture’ (2016: 76). The novel is ‘protoFoucauldian’ in its emphasis on the ‘isomorphism between institutions’ like factories, schools, hospitals and prisons (73). Playing upon the figurative aspects of technological language, Ellison thus uses technological tropes, especially the figure of the human automaton, to indict widespread forms of social control. At the same time, these episodes of the novel also point towards ideologies enacted in specific Fordist practices. Though there is figurative power in Ellison’s play with isomorphic institutions, the Ford Motor Company had already formalised such combinations of industrial technique, scientific management and sociological knowledge in the early twentieth century. The Ford Sociological Department is an instructive example. Though the company made headlines in 1914 for its drastic increase in wages with the ‘five-dollar day’, the Sociological Department determined which employees were permitted to participate in the profit-sharing plan. To qualify, employees needed to demonstrate efficiency not only on the assembly line, but also in their private lives. To that end, the company sent ‘investigators’ into employees’ homes to collect personal data, including leisure habits, marital status, savings, ostensibly ‘moral’ issues (alcohol consumption, gambling, monogamy) and perceived cultural habits (language, sanitary conditions, dress). The company’s goal was thus to ‘remake social and cultural values for men to fit the regimen of the mechanized plant’ (Meyer 1981: 123). By entwining the home, the hospital and the factory, the Ford Motor Company combined different forms of disciplinary knowledge in its project of ‘making men’. It is precisely these kinds of interconnections that Ellison satirises in his portrayal of the factory as an emblematic site of social control – one in which the narrator is broken down, retrained and remade into a new man. Far from being universal in its design and application, Ford’s quest for maximum efficiency was a response to a racialised labour problem. In the Highland Park factory in Detroit, where a vast majority of workers were immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, the company experienced massive labour turnover due to the increasing demands of mechanised assembly lines. The five-dollar day was intended to stem this tide by inducing employees to remain with competitive wages, while the Sociological Department sought to Americanise immigrant employees in order to reduce the chances of their returning to their native countries. As Esch notes, this labour problem ‘was also

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a “race” problem, in the sense that managers, reformers and scholars used the word race to describe European nationalities in the Progressive Era’ (2018: 35). Indeed, the Sociological Department required little surveillance for US-born and white-collar workers, and devoted most of its coercive scrutiny to immigrant workers (and later, at the Rouge, to Black workers). The Fordist policies described above fall under the rubric of what Roediger and Esch (2012, 2017) call ‘race management’, a set of practices that sought to mobilise racial knowledge (better described as ‘managerial race lore’) to maximise profit, including racial competition, racial development and white managerialism (2017: 148). Though these practices emerged in the US through settler colonialism and racial slavery in the antebellum era, they combined with Taylorism at the turn of the century and found their fullest expression in Ford’s factories after the First World War. While ‘paternal fantasies of generalized racial uplift’ form one component of race management, the hallmark of the white managerial impulse lies in the way ‘Americans developed a sense of themselves as white by casting their race as uniquely fit to manage land and labor and by judging how other races might come and go in the service of that project’ (2017: 142, 123). Such management was also overtly technological in many ways. From control over tools and patents to ownership of land, firms and factories, white Americans in the early twentieth century sought to contour the colour line by welding technological management to racial hierarchies. The disparate threads of race management are brilliantly drawn together in Richard Wright’s early modernist novel Lawd Today!, written between 1934 and 1938 but published posthumously in 1963. With a significant nod to James Joyce’s Ulysses, the action of the novel follows the protagonist, a Black postal worker named Jake Jackson, as he moves through Depression-era Chicago over the course of a single day.3 The novel’s second section, ‘Squirrel Cage’, devotes considerable space to technical descriptions of the Chicago Post Office, which is portrayed as a highly rationalised industrial factory. Preceded by an epigraph from Waldo Frank’s Our America, which describes ‘long, rigid rows of desiccated men and women’, Wright uses the space to portray the rote, deadening dimensions of modern industrialism (qtd in Wright 1963: 113). In addition to naturalistic passages that describe the detailed workings of mail-sorting machines and their devastation of the human sensorium, the novel depicts the racial dimensions of labour and management. Key among Wright’s observations is his emphasis on managerial surveillance: For eight long hours a clerk’s hands must be moving ceaselessly, to and fro, stacking the mail. At intervals a foreman makes rounds of inspection to see that all is going well. Under him works a legion of catfooted spies and stoolpigeons who snoop eternally. Along the walls are slits through which detectives peep and peer. (129) By the 1930s, portrayals of on-the-job factory surveillance could be found in works as disparate as Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) and the social realist historical fiction of Upton Sinclair’s The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America (1936). Yet Wright goes further, picking up on practices pioneered by Ford, by demonstrating how white employers would surveil the home lives of non-white employees, combining moral policing with managerial power. A key plot point in Lawd Today! revolves around Jake’s fear that his wife, Lil, will report an episode of Jake’s domestic violence to his employers. When he appeals to the Board of Review for a loan, the white supervisors

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question him about his spending habits, his commitment to his job and his relationship with his wife; they bring up prior citations for ‘drinking on the job’ and ‘debt dodging’ (124). Other passages portray Jake’s encounters with racist foremen and inspectors, racial competition brewing between Jake and other races and ethnicities (‘West Indian Negroes’, ‘Filipinos’) and a racial glass ceiling: ‘When a black man gets a job in the Post Office he’s done reached the top,’ one character notes with irony (148, 118). Like Ellison’s fiction and Wright’s memoir, Lawd Today! demonstrates how race management combines with scientific management and technological restriction to enforce racial and class-based inequities that pervade not only the factory floor and the post room, but the whole of life, rendering it all one massive ‘squirrel cage’. As Wright declared elsewhere, combining images of the animal and the automaton: It seems as though we are now living inside of a machine; days and events move with a hard reasoning of their own. We live amid swarms of people, yet there is a vast distance between people, a distance that words cannot bridge. (1941: 100) More than a decade before Ellison’s Brockway would call the Black workers of America ‘the machines inside the machine’, Wright turned to the site of the factory, and the imagery of mechanisation, to portray how intimately industrialisation worked according to a racial and racist logic. If Ellison’s treatment of the Liberty Paint Company in Invisible Man functions as a parable about the production of racial difference in the US, it is crucial to note that modernist works by Ellison, Wright and others also address the construction of race beyond the level of the symbolic. In their scrutiny of labour, management, industrial education and the inequities of mechanisation, Black modernist writers in the US have attended closely to what Rebecca Herzig calls ‘the tools of race-making’ (2004: 157). Decades before historians of technology came to consider ‘the technological constitution of racial identity and difference’, these writers were exploiting the ‘metaphoric flexibility’ of race and technology in order to expose the intractable myths of US civilisation (Herzig 2004: 156; Chude-Sokei 2016: 15). Thus Ellison’s narrator uses his own technological ingenuity as a metaphor for the power of words to subvert the racial ideologies and uneven technological developments that characterise US modernity: ‘Though invisible, I am in the great American tradition of tinkers. That makes me kin to Ford, Edison and Franklin. Call me, since I have a theory and a concept, a “thinker-tinker”’ (1980: 7). Placing himself at the centre of this ‘great American tradition’, Ellison’s nameless protagonist – like Ellison, Wright and other paragons of Black modernism – tinkers with the myth of whiteness itself, exposing it as a tool of racial capitalism reproduced in the Fordist factory and predicated on narratives of technological mastery and Western domination.

Notes   1. One significant exception to this critical inattention lies in the field of modernist sound studies, where scholars often draw upon African American texts, especially Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1999 [1903]) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1980 [1952]), which bookend the modernist era. Recent scholarship by Mark Goble (2010), Louis Chude-Sokei (2016) and Julie Beth Napolin (2020) has turned to literary modernism to consider how written narratives engage simultaneously with racial ideologies and recording technologies

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such as the phonograph. As Napolin argues, literature itself often functions as ‘a sound recording technology, documenting vocal rhythms, tones, and idiolects’ in ways that are implicated in a ‘technological racial unconscious’ (2020: 190, 192).   2. In what follows, I use ‘Wright’ to refer to the author, and ‘Richard’ to refer to the autobiographical subject of Black Boy.   3. Wright was employed at the Chicago Post Office numerous times between 1929 and 1937 (Ward and Butler 2008: 76). According to biographer Michel Fabre, the central post office was marked by ‘the worst working conditions of all United States post offices’, with ‘discipline worthy of a penitentiary’ (1993: 78).

Works Cited Adas, Michael (1989), Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Adorno, Theodor W. (1967), ‘Aldous Huxley and Utopia’, in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 95–118. Armstrong, Tim (1998), Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bibby, Michael (2013), ‘The Disinterested and Fine: New Negro Renaissance Poetry and the Racial Formation of Modernist Studies’, Modernism/modernity, 20: 3, pp. 485–501. Brooks, Daphne A. (2010), ‘“Sister, Can You Line It Out?”: Zora Neale Hurston and the Sound of Angular Black Womanhood’, Amerikastudien / American Studies, 55: 4, pp. 617–27. Chude-Sokei, Louis (2016), The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Danius, Sara (2002), The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Denning, Michael (1997), The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1999 [1903]), The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr, and Terri Hume Oliver. New York: Norton. Ellison, Ralph (1980 [1952]), Invisible Man. New York: Vintage Books. Esch, Elizabeth D. (2018), The Color Line and the Assembly Line: Managing Race in the Ford Empire. Oakland: University of California Press. Fabre, Michel (1993), The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, trans. Isabel Barzun, 2nd edn. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Ford, Henry, with Samuel Crowther (1922), My Life and Work. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company. Foster, Hal (2004), Prosthetic Gods. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Foucault, Michel (1977), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage. Fouché, Rayvon (2003), Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation: Granville T. Woods, Lewis H. Latimer, and Shelby J. Davidson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Goble, Mark (2010), Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Gramsci, Antonio (1988), The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916–1935, ed. David Forgacs. New York: New York University Press. Greenberg, Jonathan (2016), ‘What Huxley Got Wrong’, in Brave New World: Contexts and Legacies, ed. Jonathan Greenberg and Nathan Waddell. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 109–26. Harvey, David (1989), The Urban Experience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Harvey, David (1990), The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Social Change. Cambridge: Blackwell.

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Herzig, Rebecca (2004), ‘The Matter of Race in Histories of American Technology’, in Technology and the African-American Experience: Needs and Opportunities for Study, ed. Bruce Sinclair. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 155–70. Huxley, Aldous (1931), Music at Night & Other Essays. London: Chatto & Windus. Huxley, Aldous (1932), Brave New World. New York: Harper Perennial. Jameson, Fredric (1991), Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lieberman, Jennifer L. (2017), Power Lines: Electricity in American Life and Letters, 1882–1952. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lippmann, Walter (1941 [1922]), Public Opinion. New York: Macmillan. McKay, Claude (1929), Banjo: A Story Without a Plot. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company. Marshall, Paule (2009 [1959]), Brown Girl, Brownstones. Mineola, NY: Dover. Meyer III, Stephen (1981), The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908–1921. Albany: State University of New York Press. Mullen, Harryette (2012), The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, pp. 130–54. Napolin, Julie Beth (2020), ‘Unrecordable Sound: Media History, Technology and the Racial Unconscious’, in Sound and Literature, ed. Anna Snaith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 190–208. Nelson, Alondra (2002), ‘Introduction: Future Texts’, Social Text, 20: 2, pp. 1–15. North, Michael (1994), The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language & Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. Roediger, David R., and Elizabeth D. Esch (2012), The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roediger, David R. and Elizabeth D. Esch (2017), ‘“One Symptom of Originality”: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History’, in Class, Race, and Marxism, by David Roediger. London: Verso. Schuyler, George S. (1999 [1931]), Black No More. New York: The Modern Library. Seldes, George, assisted by Helen Seldes (1943), Facts and Fascism. New York: In Fact. Selisker, Scott (2016), Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sinclair, Bruce (2004), ‘Integrating the Histories of Race and Technology’, in Technology and the African-American Experience: Needs and Opportunities for Study, ed. Bruce Sinclair. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 1–17. Takaki, Ronald (2000), Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America, rev. edn. New York: Oxford University Press. Torgovnick, Marianna (1990), Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tuhkanen, Mikko (2009), The American Optic: Psychoanalysis, Critical Race Theory, and Richard Wright. Albany: State University of New York Press. Waddell, Nathan (2016), ‘Signs of the T: Aldous Huxley, High Art, and American Technocracy’, in Brave New World: Contexts and Legacies, ed. Jonathan Greenberg and Nathan Waddell. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 31–49. Ward, Jerry W. and Robert J. Butler, eds (2008), The Richard Wright Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Whalan, Mark (2002), ‘Jean Toomer, Technology, and Race’, Journal of American Studies, 36: 3, pp. 459–72. Wright, Richard (1941), 12 Million Black Voices. New York: Basic Books. Wright, Richard (1945), Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth. New York: Harper Perennial. Wright, Richard (1963), Lawd Today! Boston: Northeastern University Press.

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19 Technics: Education and Pharmakon in Lawrence, Simondon and Stiegler Jeff Wallace

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n Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), D. H. Lawrence wrote with emphasis: ‘The great mass of humanity should never learn to read and write – never’ (Lawrence 2004: 118). Lawrence’s post-First World War writings on education can seem to epitomise the democracy-shy paranoia of a certain strain of high modernism. His proposition (or provocation) concerning literacy follows from what he called at Fantasia’s outset ‘an age of mistaken democracy’ (62). In a prior essay, ‘Education of the People’ (1920), Lawrence had claimed that the modern aspiration to universal literacy was wrongheadedly based on the notion that all humans are equally capable of, and would equally benefit from, intellectual or ‘mental’ development. The untruth of this notion is apprehended, Lawrence insisted, by all actual teachers (he had been a schoolteacher himself for some six years, three as a pupil-teacher in Nottinghamshire, and three, qualified and salaried, in Croydon, South London): ‘every teacher’ knows that they are always confronted by a majority of ‘uninstructibles’, the extent of the latter varying, within the unstable rhetoric of Lawrence’s essay, between ‘at least fifty-per cent’ of scholars and ‘a very large majority’ (Lawrence 1988: 96). For the liberal education system of the early twentieth-century British state to insist on administering culture and literacy to such scholars was, Lawrence maintained, to ‘allow nothing except in terms of itself’ (1988: 96). Given (it is a considerable assumption) the inaptitude of the young people themselves, Lawrence’s concern was that such a policy was directly harmful to them – ‘psychologically barbaric’ – and also a form of idealist bullying (Lawrence reserved some of his most scathing moral disapprobation for the violence of bullying) (2004: 115). Conversely, he argued, the same children are clever enough to realise – with what might be called the alternative intelligence of the uninstructible – that only the ‘smatterings’ or ‘imbecile pretence’ of culture were on offer to them, through which the state could assuage its conscience whilst maintaining the necessary division of labour between minds and bodies (1988: 112).1 Beyond this schooling, they knew, lay their own inevitable capture by the industrial system – the laundry and the bottle factory. Either way, Lawrence insisted, the political correlative of this system could not be an educated democracy. ‘A little learning is a dangerous thing,’ he warns; the uninstructible majority will come to see the educated classes as ‘tricksters’ – ‘And once that happens, what becomes of your State?’ (1988: 96). To avert this threat of (presumably) chaos and insurrection within actually existing democracy, educational and political systems alike should turn, Lawrence argued, towards the ‘true democracy’ of leadership (1988: 109). In order to make crucial

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decisions about their pupils’ aptitudes and subsequent placement within a new system of education (of which more below), leading educators would have to be ‘priests of life, deep in the wisdom of life’ (107). Inevitably, this system would give rise to a hierarchy of new and distinct classes where class is defined, no longer by money, but by ‘life-quality’ or ‘quality of being’ (107–8). As if grappling with an enveloping conceptual organicism that will not provide him with a precise analogy, Lawrence writes: ‘As the leaves of a tree accumulate towards blossom, so will the great bulk of mankind at all time accumulate towards its leaders’ (109). This chapter will not be an exercise in exonerating Lawrence for his views on education; throughout, I sustain as an absolute the conviction that the denial of universal literacy is toxic. At the same time, through the lenses of technics and of the pharmakon, my discussion works to differentiate Lawrence from those surrounding contexts of anti-democratic literary modernism. Within such contexts a construct such as ‘the great mass of humanity’ would normally connect Lawrence’s educational thinking to the discourse and pseudo-science of eugenics. As Tim Armstrong has suggested, a general cultural-modernist desire ‘to intervene in the body’ brought it into inevitable if complex relation with the political interventionist aspirations of eugenics (1998: 6–8). The collective body that was the ‘great mass’ existed for eugenics both as a threat – if, in the wake of the universal elementary education established by the reforms of the later nineteenth century in Britain, it became defined as an expanded public eager to read and write – and as an opportunity: that is, for the shaping of racialised identity and destiny. In previous work, I have suggested an element of paradox in Lawrence’s relation to eugenic dehumanisation, encapsulated in the tension between his overt reaction to Wilfred Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1915) as ‘a great lie’ and ‘loud-mouthed impertinence’, and the ease with which his own views might be assimilated into eugenic policies of collective manipulation (Wallace 2005: 44–8, 152–5). Where bold pronouncements on the denial of literacy to people defined as a great mass is concerned, what price loud-mouthed impertinence?2 Undoubtedly, Lawrence’s critique of liberal-democratic education and of the extension of literacy finds resonances across the field of a eugenically oriented literary modernism. In the opening Vorticist salvo of BLAST 1 (1914), Wyndham Lewis declared education’s propensity to ‘destroy the creative instinct’; art therefore flourished where education was absent, but in a sense of the ‘popular’ that emphasised individuals rather than ‘the People’ (2009: 7). In later writings such as The Art of Being Ruled (1926), Lewis continued to allude to the democratic illusion of educational systems. W. B. Yeats’s On the Boiler (1939) is seen by Donald J. Childs as a culmination of degenerationist fears held by the poet since the turn of the century: ‘Forcing reading and writing on those who wanted neither was the worst part of the violence which for two centuries has been creating that hell wherein we suffer,’ Yeats wrote (qtd in Childs 2001: 149). T. S. Eliot’s poetry is held by John Carey (1992) to embody a distaste for those urban masses who were spiritually dead yet insistent on reading. Yet the actually more nuanced and sustained position of Eliot’s The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) bears some comparison with Lawrence’s defence of the working-class child. By ‘substituting instruction for education’ and ‘fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy’, Liberalism facilitated ‘its own negation’ and demonstrated the ‘chaos of ideals and confusion of thought in our large scale mass education’ (Eliot 1939: 16, 40). Eliot’s firm if reluctant conclusion – ‘however

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undemocratic it may sound’ – is that a coherent culture could be maintained only by a ‘positive distinction . . . between the educated and the uneducated’ (40). Before tracing a eugenical subtext in Mrs Dalloway, Donald J. Childs highlights the visceral nature of Virginia Woolf’s diary response to a group of institutionalised patients she had ‘had to’ walk past in public – ‘They should certainly be killed’ (qtd in Childs 2001: 23). Woolf’s terminology – ‘a long line of imbeciles’ – recalls the reliance of Aldous Huxley’s prose writings on such categories. Huxley’s essays from the late 1920s through the 1930s are steeped in degenerationism, posing an intriguing question about their relationship with the satire on eugenics that Brave New World (1932) seemed to be. Huxley’s abiding concern with ‘varieties’ of inherited intelligence led to periodic reflections on how this might be squared with the democratic expansion of education and literacy. In the essay ‘Education’, contemplating the self-evidently ‘enormous’ defects of the current ‘ordinary system of mass education’, Huxley’s endorsement was of a system aspiring to meet the needs of individual students (1927: 113). Whilst more overtly individualist than Lawrence’s thinking, Huxley’s scepticism about the ‘hopes of the ardent educationists of the democratic epoch’ when these are based on the fallacy that ‘all minds are alike and can profit by the same system of training’ resonates strongly with Lawrence’s slightly earlier condemnation of educational bullying (Huxley 1927: 98–9). Lawrence certainly had more lived experience than any of these peers as an educator within the state systems under critique. This experience informed an educative drive in his work that has begun to attract more scholarly attention.3 The two essays by Lawrence under discussion here are distinctive, within literary modernism’s attention to education, in their scale, creative experimentalism and directness of intent. Through a comparison with the concept of technics as this is elaborated in the philosophies of Gilbert Simondon (1924–89) and Bernard Stiegler (1952–2020), my aim will be to open out the complexity of what it meant for Lawrence to educate bodies as much as to educate people or ‘the People’. Where Aldous Huxley could briskly assert that the ‘problem of bodily training has been solved’, more or less, because the body is visible, whereas the continuing problem of mental education was that ‘we are unable to see the mind’ (1927: 89, 91), Lawrence’s far less reductive deployment of mind–body dualism warrants new attention. This therefore will be to reapproach the scandal of ‘The great mass of humanity should never learn to read and write’, but without seeking to redeem it: I reiterate here that Lawrence’s proposition is toxic. Rather, the chapter is a way of testing out the possibility of taking such toxicity at its word, by applying to Lawrence’s views the ambivalent concept of the pharmakon that is associated with toxicity itself. How might a poison relate to its inherent potential as antidote or cure? Conversely, in what sense did the strong curative or benevolent motivation of Lawrence’s educational thinking – ‘But particularly’, he writes in Fantasia of the Unconscious, ‘let us take care of the children’ – become so poisonous (2004: 119)? The principle of the pharmakon is itself at the heart of technics as this is elaborated implicitly in Simondon but more overtly in Stiegler. In each, to think of technics is effectively to take up Martin Heidegger’s injunction to consider more carefully the meaning of technology in human lives; it is also, both in Simondon’s ‘social pedagogics’ (Bardin and Menegalle 2015: 15) and in Stiegler’s tireless critiques of early twentyfirst century industrial populism, to think about the principle of care, particularly the care of children. Care is at the heart of the pharmakon’s ambivalence, as Stiegler, following D. W. Winnicott, notes in defining the pharmakon as a transitional object

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first encountered in the form of the mother’s care for the child. It is not something that ex-ists so much as con-sists, and which begins to transmit to the child the feeling that life is worth living: The pharmakon is at once what enables care to be taken and that of which care must be taken – in the sense that it is necessary to pay attention: its power is curative to the immeasurable extent (dans la mesure et la démesure) that it is also destructive. (Stiegler 2013: 4) In each of the two closely related essays upon which this chapter draws, Lawrence meditates upon the potential of education to be both curative and destructive. The first version of ‘Education of the People’ was drafted late in 1918, while the second and only published version was begun in mid-1920. Neither appeared in Lawrence’s lifetime, being successively rejected by the Times Educational Supplement and Stanley Unwin. Fantasia of the Unconscious was begun in June 1921 and published in New York on 23 October 1922. In what follows I take the latitude to move freely between ‘Education’ and Fantasia, on the grounds of the significant emphases they share, and despite certain differences of orientation. ‘Education’ sets out as an ideological critique of the British elementary and secondary education system, containing within it a detailed blueprint and rationale for an alternative system. Yet insofar as this alternative system is grounded in the call for ‘a new mode of human relationship’, based in its turn on ‘a different notion of the nature of children’ (Lawrence 1988: 115, 117), the essay presents one of Lawrence’s first elaborations of an idiosyncratic schema for the understanding of human consciousness – the so-called solar plexus theory, a physiology of four dynamic centres in the body. Fantasia, setting out as an essay on ‘child consciousness’, reprises this schema by developing the passing pronouncement made in the intervening essay, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, that ‘Education now is widely at sea,’ and that we must understand the nature of consciousness at the four dynamic centres ‘before we can even begin to consider a genuine system of education’ (2004: 31–2). But it also directly returns to the scene of ‘Education’; the latter’s suggestion, for example, that ‘We should be wise if by decree we shut up all elementary schools at once, and kept them shut’ (1988: 100) becomes in Fantasia the (ventriloquised) decree itself: ‘Parents, the State can no longer be responsible for the mind and character of your children. From the first day of the coming year, all schools will be closed for an indefinite period’ (2004: 114). Both essays reflect upon the parental responsibilities ensuing from this fantasy scenario, notably Fantasia’s chapter on the nature of parental love, tying parenting to a set of highly heteronormative nostrums on sexual relationships and family roles – concerns with which ‘Education’ had also concluded. Another injection of toxin, then, into the body politic: the closure of schools, to help deliver illiteracy. Driving each gesture is a technics, concerning a human relation to materiality, where the latter signifies both the physical world to which we belong and the tools and technologies we generate within it. Its core in Lawrence is situated thus: ‘In the early years, a child’s education should be entirely non-mental’; ‘There should be no effort made to teach children to think’ (1988: 142; 2004: 112). ‘Early years’ means pre-school only; Fantasia proceeds to construct a blueprint for a subsequent school system which actually adheres to a universal if differentiated

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literacy. Elementary education between the years of seven and twelve would consist of mornings given over to reading, writing and arithmetic, and afternoons given over to martial sports, games, exercise and workshops in which each child would be trained in a highly gender-specific ‘domestic craft’. This system, Lawrence proposes, would provide ‘a common human basis, a common radical understanding’ (1988: 98). At the age of twelve, those less amenable to intellectual study would continue with two hours of ‘mental’ education per day, while those attending secondary schools with a curriculum extending to languages and science would continue with an hour a day in craft workshops and physical training. When apprenticeship and semi-apprenticeship paths are taken at the age of fourteen, provision for reading and mental education continues for all; conversely, those who proceed to colleges at sixteen for the further study of science, liberal arts or pure and technical arts would continue and emerge with a training in at least one technical skill or craft. Despite, then, this system’s seemingly inflexible categorisations, locking young people into the strata of a new class society through the decisions of priestly educators, the division between ‘mental’ and ‘non-mental’ in Lawrence’s educational thinking was not a division of people as such. Not even the scholar deemed to have ‘no capacity for true learning or understanding’ would receive a non-mental education (1988: 96). Rather, the non-mental as such becomes in Lawrence’s writing a rebalancing principle of physical relatedness infinitely extending beyond the school years – a kind of lifelong unlearning, or permanent pursuit of the knowledge of ‘how not to know’ (2004: 111). ‘A good part of the life of every human creature’, he asserts, ‘should pass in mindless, active occupation . . . Busy, intent, absorbed work, forgetfulness, this is one of the joys of life’ (1988: 154). It is both typical and apposite that Lawrence should offer concrete and sensuous examples of this joy of life, and here is the first of two such examples around which I want to weave a comparison with the realm of technics. Supposing we are to learn to solder a kettle . . . . It is a question of knowing, by direct physical contact, your kettle-substance, your kettle-curves, your solder, your soldering-iron, your fire, your resin, and all the fusing, slipping interaction of all these. A question of direct knowing by contact, not a question of understanding . . . . Know by immediate sensual contact. Know by the tension and reaction of the muscles, know, know profoundly but forever untellably, at the spontaneous primary centres. (154) Let us take a detour around and back to this scenario of direct knowing, of kettlesubstance and kettle-curves, through Gilbert Simondon. Simondon’s principal commentator, Muriel Combes (2013), maintains that the apparently stark difference of orientation between his two major works, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1958) and L’Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (The Individual and its Physico-Biological Genesis) (1964), for some time obscured their common ground as studies of ontology. As Elizabeth Grosz puts it, Simondon’s concern was with ‘the various processes of self-formation that create what is’, whether these entities are human or technological, organic or inorganic (2017: 170). Combes alludes to the debt to Simondon in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and insofar as Deleuze and Guattari located in experimental modernist fiction (that of Lawrence and Woolf in particular) a sense of the impersonal forces that bring beings and their haecceities into play, we might see

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in Simondon’s conception of transindividuation a key element in modernist theories of becoming. This is implicit in the way Simondon takes up the Heideggerian challenge to think the ‘essence’ of technology as a means of human bringing-forth or revealing, rather than as a mode of instrumentality simply defined by use. Heidegger had argued that, in the context of the centrality of technology to the project of modernity, the instrumentalist attitude was extended to the physical world as mere raw material for human disposition, and to humans within that world as ‘standing-reserve’ – a general orientation of the Anthropocene which is now widely acknowledged to have helped precipitate environmental crisis. Within this state of unfreedom, technology’s essence could never be approached if simply on its own terms: ‘the essence of technology is by no means anything technological’ (Heidegger 2011: 217). We may at this point recall Lawrence’s questioning of the refusal of educational idealism to be understood on any but its own terms – as if the essence of literacy were by no means anything defined by reading and writing. For Simondon, the precondition of an emancipated thinking of technology was closely comparable to Heidegger’s emphasis upon the Greek root word technē as signifying the activity or skill both of the craftsman and of the artist, linked in turn to epistēmē where both are general terms for knowing but, in the latter case, as a state of immersion that at least invites comparison with the ‘direct knowing’ we might need to solder a kettle: ‘to be entirely at home in something, to understand and be expert in it’ (Heidegger 2011: 222). How, then, does technics, or technicity, differ from technology? In Simondon, this is a question of the equivalence of culture and technology as forms of human making, modulating into a way of teaching technology that assumes this equivalence with culture whilst maintaining a meaningful distinction between them. As a pedagogica